My work as an artist focuses on three quite different approaches to painting, all relating to one another, yet investigating my overall interest in the mergence or coexistence of abstraction and representation from completely different art historical vantage points.

The first being contemporary graffiti art using only spray paint and working under the moniker "Subone.” The second body of work, which serves as a counterbalance to the bright colors and bold expressions of my large scale, speedy graffiti works, consists of small and delicate easel paintings, which are slow to produce a have a much more muted and subtle pallet. Painted in oil on linen with very small brushes, these works allow me to slow down and refine the process of their physical, visual and intellectual construction. I believe a good painting is a beautiful, handcrafted, one of a kind object, which in some mysterious ways has a life of it's own and holds within it a story, like a safe does valuables. No reproduction can ever replace the aura an original painting can possess. Growing up in Heidelberg, Germany the second oldest University City in Europe I came across many historic paintings without having to look for them. Even as a kid I was very aware of the powerful energy that time had created, aside from the works meaning, which is why I oftentimes make my paintings look old, thereby insinuating them to be predictions, even prophecies about contemporary issues from times past. 


Visually inspired by the language of 18 and 19th century historic painting, especially British works, surrealism and contemporary abstraction all my paintings deal with life today. My personal experiences, politics, social commentary and art historical references are condensed into a somewhat humorously simplified scenario and presented to the viewer as an intricately constructed, stage like scene that oftentimes is not what it seems. The works titles serve an important role in that they are necessary to understand the paintings intended meanings and oftentimes give them a humorous twist by a play of words.


The third approach to painting I call "Free Form Flow", which I have been creating since 2002. Strongly inspired by my work in the street, specifically the notion of inventing a form (style) of graffiti that qualifies as "traditional" in terms of it's "flow", (a word graffiti artists use to describe a much sought after "dynamic motion" that maintains a perfect balance between each individual letter and the entire word as an image), size and color, yet completely lets go of the letters, hence "free Form". In "Free Form Flow" I arrange these formal interests, so important to graffiti art, into a narrative on canvas, that seeks to find a balance, a unification, with the abstract. I would like the viewer to look at them twice, once as narrative paintings and then as abstractions. I am attempting to combine the recognizable and therefore narrative elements in my paintings with the emotive and visual power of the abstract ones, in order to better convey the feeling of the moment I am describing. This struggle to maintain an equal balance and harmonious union between a story and an (abstract) image is an inherent part of my artistic identity. I'm never happy with just one of them isolated from the other, possibly because I feel that Life itself is too abstract and too dependant on perspectives, view points and interpretations to be successfully referenced in art by using simply a realistic image or an abstraction by itself. Art is the only place where this union between the abstract and the recognizable can successfully exist and I want to take advantage of that.

In "The Trials and Tribulations of Painting" this internal struggle is the painting's subject. The recognizable elements, representing me and my dedication to the tradition of painting, are in the midst of a vicious yet futile battle to beat the inevitably invading abstract elements back into the back round with a rock, kicking them and shooting at them with a gun, yet in the painting as an image they are frozen together in permanent harmony.

April 2010