Your recent pieces often evoke a sense of emergence from turmoil. How do you conceive of chaos as a creative force rather than an obstacle in your work?
Before I begin, I hold an overall condition in mindnot a story, but a mood that stays with me throughout the process. I don’t try to hide tension or “fix” chaos. I let it enter the work through the quality of the line, the tremor of the hand, and the rhythm of movement. Even the weather becomes language: if my body is cold and unstable, the brokenness of the line belongs to the piece.
With color, I avoid over-correcting. When a color feels excessive or “wrong,” I pause and ask whether it matches the inner state I’m carrying. If it does, I keep it. I stop when the work reaches a point of calm because more intervention can erase the honesty that made the image possible.
In your return after 30 years, what internal dialogue changed most – the way you think about art, or the way you feelIn your return after 30 years, what internal dialogue changed most – the way you think about art, or the way you feel it? it?
After returning to art following a long pause, what changed most is how I listen to the work through the body. Decisions come from rhythm speed, pressure, and the small pauses of the hand. That physical rhythm tells me when to move forward and when to stop.
There is a moment in every piece when a sudden distance appears between me and the image. I’ve learned to treat that distance as a signal: it means the work is complete, and further control becomes merely technical. If I push past that point, I risk weakening the coherence of the piece. In that sense, my return has made me more disciplined about stopping. Restraint has become part of authorship one of the ways I protect the direction and integrity of the work.
In your art, how do you approach the idea that silence itself speaks – that emptiness is a form of presence rather than absence?
My works begin with personal experience, but I don’t want them to remain at the level of confession. Form is what carries them beyond that. The body’s rhythm how the hand moves, hesitates, insists becomes structure, and structure becomes language.
I’m careful about the process: when to build, when to interrupt, when to step back. That conscious control prevents the work from turning into a private diary. The image has to stand on its own, without needing my biography to explain it.
If a painting can survive without a narrative attached to it, then it has reached independence. That is the point I aim for: where the work still holds a human truth, but the viewer can enter it through their own perception not through my personal story.
What do you see as the relationship between suffering and insight in artistic life – and does your work question or affirm that relationship?
Life has placed me among many people and situations during the years I was away from art, and those encounters entered the work directly. Each painting connects to a human condition not only to my private emotions.
For example, in a piece titled Game, I thought about people trapped in money-based games where the line between winning and losing is thin, and the outcome can be ruin. But I don’t treat it as a closed story. For a wider viewer, it becomes a broader metaphor: life as a cycle of gains and losses, with a shared ending we all recognize.
So my work doesn’t romanticize suffering, but it doesn’t deny it either. It asks what suffering reveals, and whether insight can exist without cost. The viewer completes that question from their own position.
Do you think art can heal – not only viewers but also artists themselves? If so, how does that idea impact your practice?
I believe art can hold a healing function but not as a slogan. For me, healing is not about “feeling better.” It’s about clarity and release: the work lets experience move through form instead of staying trapped inside the body.
My practice is built on lived encounters. I keep returning to human situations because they are the source of my images. Over time, I aim for the work to move beyond my individuality toward something more universal, where the image is no longer only about one person or one event, but about existence, fate, and what remains unseen.
As experience deepens, my visual language becomes simpler and more focused. That concentration is part of the healing: fewer explanations, less decoration, more truth. The work becomes a distillation rather than an escape.
Your website reflects a journey through adversity and rediscovery. How does the external world – society, culture, global events – influence the solitude of your studio practice?
The external world influences my work even when I’m alone.
Society, culture, and global events shape the conditions we carry into the studio what we fear, what we endure, what we cannot say. But I don’t translate headlines into images. My work is built on encounter, not direct narrative.
A painting should be able to live without explanation. Viewers are free to respond positively or negatively; that range of reading is part of the work’s life. Yet interpretation is not limitless. The work has a direction, and if a reading moves completely outside that direction, it often says more about the viewer’s projections than about the painting itself.
My responsibility is to create a space for encounter strong enough to hold many interpretations, but coherent enough to resist becoming anything at all.
Many of your works seem to hold memory as a material. How does personal memory interact with collective memory within your compositions?
I treat memory as material something with weight, texture, and residue. Personal memory enters first, but it rarely stays private. The moment it becomes form line, repetition, fragmentation it starts to speak beyond the individual.
Collective memory appears through shared patterns: the gestures we recognize, the tensions we inherit, the faces that feel familiar without belonging to anyone specific. I’m interested in how a private experience can resonate inside a broader human field. That resonance is where the work gains strength.
I don’t aim to illustrate events or document a community. Instead, I allow the image to carry traces like fragments of something remembered and half-forgotten. The viewer often meets the work through their own memory, and the painting becomes a point of overlap: my experience, their experience, and what exists between us as a shared condition.
Silence appears to play an important role in your paintings. What does silence allow you to access that sound, narrative, or explanation cannot?
Silence is not emptiness to me. It is a form of presence something active that holds the image together. Silence gives me access to what sound, explanation, or story cannot: the moment before meaning becomes fixed.
When the work is too clearly narrated, it closes. Silence keeps it open. It allows ambiguity without becoming vague, and it lets the viewer enter without being instructed. In my process, silence is also practical: it slows the hand, sharpens attention, and makes me more honest about what the image actually needs.
I often return to silence when I feel the work becoming overly controlled. The quiet space is where the painting breathes. It’s where the smallest decision an interruption, a pause, a missing piece can carry the most truth. Silence becomes a structural element, not a mood.
When you stand before a blank canvas, do you experience it as freedom, confrontation, or responsibility – and how does that first moment shape what follows?
Standing before a blank canvas is all three: freedom, confrontation, and responsibility. It is freedom because anything is possible; confrontation because nothing has been earned yet; responsibility because every mark defines the direction that follows.
The first moment matters because it sets the rhythm. I don’t begin with a complete plan, but I do begin with a condition an atmosphere that I’m willing to carry until the end. The earliest marks are not details; they are commitments. They decide whether the painting will become too controlled, too decorative, or too evasive.
I try to begin in a way that keeps the work honest. If the first mark is too confident, the painting can become performance. If it is too hesitant, it can become avoidance. I aim for a first gesture that is real one that belongs to the body and the moment.
In an era of speed, images, and constant visibility, what does slowness mean to you as an artistic value?
In a world where images are consumed quickly, slowness is a conscious choice. Much of what we see today relies on speed effects, surface skill, instant impact, or direct reproduction. My process doesn’t work that way, because my images come from time spent with people and from lived experience. Those experiences don’t become form immediately; they need to settle.
Slowness allows me to move past the surface of the image and reach something more essential something that feels earned rather than produced. It is not nostalgia or resistance to the present. It is a refusal of superficiality.
For me, slowness is also ethical: it respects the weight of human situations. If the subject is real, it deserves time. The painting should not look like a quick conclusion. It should feel like a distilled encounter.
How did the experience of presenting your work in this virtual exhibition shape your understanding of space and presence – compared to exhibiting in a physical gallery?
The difference between online and physical exhibition is like the difference between seeing a photograph of someone and meeting them in person. Online, the image is visible, but presence is reduced.
In a physical gallery, scale, distance, silence, and the viewer’s body become part of the work. The painting isn’t only looked at; it is encountered. The viewer’s movement, proximity, and time spent in front of the piece activate layers that can’t fully translate through a screen.
This virtual exhibition made me think more carefully about what “presence” means. Online access expands reach, but it also removes certain conditions especially the bodily experience of space. That loss is real. At the same time, the gain is also real: the work can meet viewers across geography, time zones, and barriers of entry. The question becomes how to design the digital encounter so it still carries intention, rhythm, and depth.
Why did you decide to host a digital exhibition and not a physical one?
I don’t see a digital exhibition as a replacement for a physical one. I see it as a different stage of encounter. Online space gives people who are geographically distant or unfamiliar with my work a first entry point. It’s a way of opening the door.
For me, the digital exhibition functions as an invitation: those who connect with the work through this format may later seek a physical encounter, where the body and space intensify the experience. But I also recognize that physical access isn’t always possible, and in that sense the online format is not secondary it’s necessary.
So the decision is not about avoiding the gallery. It’s about expanding access and building relationship. The aim is to let the work travel, while still protecting its meaning. Digital presence, when done thoughtfully, can create real attention not just visibility.
Virtual exhibitions allow visitors to “walk” a space online and interact with art 24/7. In your view, how does the absence of physical embodiment change a viewer’s emotional engagement with a work?
A virtual exhibition changes the emotional encounter because the viewer’s body is removed from the space. In a physical setting, the work is measured against the viewer’s scale, and silence, distance, and time become part of the experience. Online, the image can feel faster and more “consumable.” The viewer engages mainly through the eye, not through presence.
That said, the absence of embodiment doesn’t mean the encounter is empty. It can produce a different intimacy: viewers can return repeatedly, spend time privately, and meet the work without the social pressure of a public space. The challenge is to prevent the work from becoming merely content.
For me, the solution is structure and intention: how the virtual space guides attention, how the works are sequenced, and how the viewer is invited to slow down. When those elements are designed carefully, the digital encounter can still feel deliberate less like browsing, more like entering.
In an age of hybrid art experiences (physical + digital), what do you think is lost – and what is gained – when viewers interact with art outside a traditional museum space?
In hybrid art experiences, something is lost: the physical authority of the work scale, texture, silence, and the viewer’s bodily relationship to space. Certain layers of painting depend on distance, movement, and time in a room. Those layers cannot be fully replaced.
But something is also gained: access, continuity, and new forms of encounter. The work can reach viewers who would never enter a traditional museum or gallery, and it can live beyond the limits of a schedule. Digital space also allows repeated engagement returning, revisiting, comparing without barriers.
The risk is flattening: turning art into quick content. The responsibility, then, is curatorial and intentional design. Hybrid can be meaningful when the digital experience is not treated as a lesser copy, but as its own space with its own rhythm. The goal is not to imitate the gallery, but to create a different kind of attention.
For more information, please follow @zeef_oria and visit https://www.zeeforia.com/.
