About

My work explores how taboos and cultural hierarchies shape the way we see ourselves and others. I’m interested in how beauty, shame, and aspiration get encoded into the image — how the surface of a painting can reveal the deeper mechanics of desire and fear. I draw from the language of Old Master portraiture and the theatricality of fashion and mise-en-scène. The figures in my paintings often hover between sincerity and satire, parody and confession. They come from my own life — from friendships and betrayals, from intimacy and ambition — refracted through the aesthetic systems I grew up revering and resisting.

The paintings are, in a sense, self-portraits of negotiation: between histories, between the person I was taught to be and the one I became. I think of my practice as a kind of reconstruction. Each work borrows from Mannerism and the Dutch Golden Age — traditions built on illusion — but I use those same techniques to undo the illusions themselves. Within the lacquered surfaces and artificial light, I’m searching for something closer to truth: a recognition that artifice, too, can be honest.

Exhibition Information: Palo Gallery | Fridman Gallery