Artist Statement
My series “The Ecstatic Eye” extend my work on the tradition of landscape, attempting to portray the urban environment with a fresh post-modern, point of view. I am interested in forgotten areas of the late industrial city, marginal areas which verge on the natural and where a sort of everyday sublime can be found. The paintings also deal with the relationships between abstraction and representation or painting and photography. My process involved shooting in these isolated areas at dawn and later choosing images where representation and “photographic truth” begin to break down, where lens flares and digital sun dogs appear and a mysterious other quality begins to emerge, a feeling of the ancient Greek idea of “ecstasis”—of being outside of oneself, outside of time. These images are then transformed into large scale paintings where the ordinary begins to take on an uncanny quality and the everyday world is made transcendent and strange.
