Ebb Tide, 2025

Oil on linen (The piece was exhibited as part of my Bachelor’s graduation show).

Perhaps the painting can be seen as a kind of exploded grid, a reference to my artistic predecessors. It holds a sense of symmetry and repetition, inviting the relaxed eye to wander across the surface without anchoring to any specific point. There is a refusal of fixation, yet the composition resists coherence, remaining ambiguous and map-like, unstable, shifting, and ultimately ungraspable. This is not a still image or a frozen moment. Rather, the painting possesses dynamic qualities; it moves. The surface changes with time, and when touched by light, it appears to animate. The painting engages with temporality and perception, it is a living surface that unfolds rather than declares. A central aspect of my current process involves not only the accumulation of layers, but also their removal. I search for another dimension within the painting, not just how it might extend beyond the frame, but how it might turn inward, deepening into itself. My engagement with the surface is not limited to its outermost layer. I feed pigment into the work, and at times I sand the surface gently, making room for what lies beneath to re-emerge. Color sinks into the fabric, and this process of sedimentation is what ultimately forms the surface. It continues to shift, like sand continually reshaped by the tide. This painting is a shoreline, formed through both action and absence. Just as the moon never touches the ocean but still shapes its tides, so too are mood, memory, and emotion present in the work, not through direct expression, but through subtle guidance. The painting is not a result of intentional gestures, but rather the trace of their retreat. The edges, where each layer remains visible, function not as borders but as thresholds. They allow the work to resist symbolic readability, to remain open and unresolved. In this way, the painting stays unfinished, uncontained and permeable, with its entire history exposed to view.