Woman with Inflatable Beach Mattress, 2022
oil on linen
In the painting “Woman with Inflatable Beach Mattress”, I depict a woman who is trying to inflate an inflatable mattress by the lake. The mattress seems to rotate around her body and to wrap it from all sides, hiding the woman’s face and half of her body so that only her ear is sticking out. The woman and her inflatable mattress seem to merge and become a sort of hybrid. It seems that the woman’s body itself acquires the materiality of the plastic mattress. The motif of the painting is reminiscent of Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, as the pattern of Venus’s shell is alluded repeated in the plastic folds of the mattress. Only who is reborn? The protruding part of the mattress resembles a fish tail. Is she transforming into a fish? Or perhaps into some other living being? In that case, is she still a human?