The Quiet Language of Small Things

Aug 16
3 min read

My paintings rarely begin with a story. They begin as a persistent feeling, a fragment of a dream, the atmosphere of a place that has never existed and yet feels deeply familiar. I paint because following these images has always brought me closer to questions that cannot be answered through language alone.

Before becoming a full time artist, I studied psychology. I never wanted to illustrate psychological theory. What stayed with me was an enduring fascination with the symbolic language that appears across cultures and throughout history. Some images seem older than the civilizations that gave them names. They survive because they continue to carry meaning without ever becoming fixed.

This is how the visual language of my work has evolved. Hooded figures, eggs, serpents, bones, dark rivers and silent creatures return from one painting to another. They are companions within the same universe, each carrying its own presence while remaining open to new interpretations.

Many of my paintings inhabit a landscape where memory and perception overlap, where familiar places quietly shift into something unknown. These thresholds continue to draw me because they allow reality and imagination to exist within the same space.

Being self taught gave me the freedom to develop this language without feeling tied to a particular movement or tradition. Medieval icon painting, Jungian thought, mythology, surrealism and science fiction have all shaped my work. Over the years these influences have intertwined until they became different roots of the same tree. Today I no longer think about where one influence ends and another begins. They nourish the same world.

The materials I use belong to that world as naturally as the imagery itself. I work primarily on traditional limewood icon panels. Every panel is prepared with rabbit skin glue and multiple layers of traditional gesso, or levkas, creating a luminous surface that reflects light from within. The image develops through successive translucent layers of oil paint, allowing depth to emerge gradually over time. During the final stages I often work with calligraphy brushes, whose precision allows even the smallest gestures to remain intentional.

Most of my paintings are small.

Their scale is an essential part of the experience. A small painting does not compete for attention. It waits for someone willing to approach it. As the distance disappears, the encounter becomes surprisingly intimate, almost like holding an ancient relic instead of standing before a contemporary painting. Looking slows down. Every detail asks for time. The painting becomes less of an image and more of a quiet conversation between two people.

This intimacy has become one of the foundations of my practice. Some of humanity’s most treasured objects fit into the palm of a hand. Their presence comes from attention, craftsmanship and the feeling that they have carried something precious across time. I hope my paintings offer a similar experience.

The landscapes surrounding Geneva have also become part of this visual language. The changing light, the mountains and the shifting atmosphere quietly find their way into my paintings, transformed into emotional landscapes where the outer world and the inner world reflect one another.

Over the years I realised that I was never creating individual paintings. I was building a universe with its own geography, mythology and inhabitants. Every new work becomes another place within that landscape, another voice within the same world.

Painting continues to surprise me because every finished work opens the door to the next one. The destination has never interested me as much as the way each image gives rise to the next, as if the work itself is already reaching beyond its own edges.

As long as there are still unseen places within this universe, I will continue painting them into existence.

Artist Information