Hybrids
2025
Oil on Canvas
What we retain of those we love, and what we lose: that is the subject of these paintings.
Memory is not a recording. It is a reconstruction: imperfect, selective, shaped by desire and loss. Each time we recall a face, we do not retrieve it but rebuild it: approximating the geometry, filling gaps with feeling, assembling presence from what remains.
These paintings begin there. Working from photographs, I use custom software to extract the structural landmarks of a face, the intervals, alignments, and proportions that constitute a likeness, and translate them into vector paths drawn by a plotter onto a primed canvas. What the machine lays down is accurate but incomplete: a skeleton of the image, waiting.
Then I return with oils. In the space between the plotted lines, I reconstruct the face from memory, not the photograph's memory, but my own. The painting becomes an act of recollection as much as representation. Presence builds slowly, layer by layer, the way it does in the mind.
The resulting works are neither portraits nor copies. They are mementos: physical traces of an encounter between a face and the attention brought to it. Accurate in structure, intimate in surface.
Barthes wrote that what pierces us in a photograph, what he called its punctum, is not what it shows but what it cannot hold: the knowledge that what was there is now gone, that the photograph is the trace of a death. These paintings work in that wound. The plotter carries the photograph's accuracy into the canvas; the brush carries the fallibility of the living.
