Origin of the Gesture

The photograph is nothing heroic.

I am not painting. I am washing my brushes.

Apron speckled with paint, hands immersed in the sink at the Academy of Fine Arts, I look at the camera with a faint, almost mischievous smile. Behind me, the smell of turpentine. A scent that, years later, would become so familiar it would merge with the very idea of the studio.

I do not remember deciding to become an artist.I remember a space.

The Academy was a place apart. A territory devoted to artistic research, to a freedom I did not find elsewhere. There, sensitivity was not a distraction; it had legitimacy. Painting was not a pastime. It was a way of existing differently.

Very early on, I turned toward materiality.

Skin, drapery, surfaces. I was not merely trying to represent; I was trying to anchor. Creating allowed me to root myself in a specific material reality. To touch with the eyes. To experience the density of the world through painted surface.

Already, there was the ambiguity that still runs through my work: the softness of fabric capable of becoming a shroud. Caress and disappearance. Presence and erasure.

Solitude was not withdrawal.It was my way of entering the world.

Creating opened an inner space where the child who drifts upward meets the one who seeks to integrate, to connect. Painting became a form of recollection — an almost ritual gesture — a space from self to self.

What has not changed is the will and the joy to create.

What has changed is mastery, awareness, discipline.

Even today, I return to that point of origin: a studio, a material, a repeated gesture.

Washing the brushes. Beginning again.