ON ART

I. THE SETTING

In art history, they call it the Rückenfigur. I didn’t love it at first – not until it started to make sense to me. I view it not as a hero conquering a mountain, but as a human being fully present, taking up their space – not owned, not entitled, just borrowed for a moment in time, embraced by nature.

When I was young, I was drawn to Monet – an outsider in my own family, who felt it was far too romantic. But I cared about the light, the atmosphere, and the courage to hold a mood.

As a teenager, I wanted to become an architect. My mother talked me out of it, but I loved how architecture combined the practical with beauty – the idea of thinking about the wiring inside the walls while designing a space that naturally fits its surroundings. When I drew buildings back then, I wouldn’t clear the ground; I would draw the walls around existing nature, putting a whole big tree at the very center of the home.

In my early twenties in Spain – first calling Sitges home, then Barcelona – that architectural eye came into its own. Living among architects, I watched space functionally and aesthetically at once: how light drops into a courtyard, how a threshold frames a body, how materials carry heat and shadow, and how a built space dictates human movement.

Later came Antony Gormley. In 2015, looking at his work, I realized it is not just about placing a body into a space as a vessel or a measuring tape. It is about how the world then surrounds that body – how the terrain, the climate, the air, the architecture, even other people press against the physical form.

II. THE PAINTING

When my dad was at the end of his life, he picked out a painting for me.

A huge Buddha on one side, a tiny lone figure high on the other looking right into the Buddha’s face, titled with the initials of Friedrich. I didn’t understand it. It was unlike the work he made that I loved, and it felt unfinished.

He chose it on intuition. Because for all the art between us, he didn’t really know me. He didn’t really know himself.

After he passed away, I found out a lot of hard truths about him, and I was angry. The painting didn’t make it easier.

He always maintained that he had nothing more to say about his canvases once they were finished – that the meaning existed completely apart from what he had painted. In his view, an artist steps away entirely to give both himself and the work their independence. Just before he died, I spoke with him about this canvas. I got a strange non-answer.

Looking back at that painting now, I see it as the moment he handed me his brush.

III. THE SUBTEXT

I spent years studying literary theory, classical texts, theater, and cinema – from Virgil and Ovid to Ibsen and Wilde.

In structuralism and pure theory, there is a drive toward abstract systems where there is no space for the “I.” They try to eliminate the human element – the author, the reader, the specific historical reality, the raw subjectivity. I could never accept that.

For me, an artwork – whether a theater text, a piece of architecture, or a photograph – is never a cold, clinical object. It is an active interaction.

It is Rodin’s precision of physical weight: emotion held in the tension of a shoulder, a bent neck, gravity, and touch. It is that same truth set in motion by Bambie, a Dutch company I kept returning to – the anti-mime mime, who took the cold precision of the form and filled it with everything mime usually leaves out: the body as a mirror of the inner world, the deepest fears and desires made physical, tragedy and comedy so close they arrive in a single gesture.

It is Antony Gormley again: the body placed into the world, the terrain, the air, and the people pressing back against it. It is theater’s understanding of offstage space – knowing that what happens beyond the frame is as real as what sits inside it. Always, it is the gap between what is done on the surface and the weight running underneath.

My father and I shared a love of cinema, from Julia Roberts to Godard. Three films reached me more than the rest, all for the same reason: each holds its light inside the hard thing, not apart from it.

Chocolat – the restless wind toward more life, more people, more places, alive inside a town that wants none of it; the film my previous business name came from. Der Krieger und die Kaiserin – love as the thing that can heal an existential wound, found in the middle of psychiatry, trauma, and otherness. And Black Butterflies, about the poet Ingrid Jonker – her poetry burning inside apartheid and a life that could consume its maker.

At a point in my life, I felt I was going down a path very close to Ingrid Jonker’s. I chose a more mundane one, though I can still see how I could have lived hers.

Not despite the darkness. With it. That is the only kind of beauty I trust – and the only kind I try to make.

IV. YOU

T.S. Eliot wrote that no artist has a complete meaning alone – that we exist in relation to the dead poets and artists before us, carrying a whole tradition in our bones.

When a picture is taken, it is detached at birth. Juli Zeh wrote that writing brings forth not one text, but countless – at least one for every reader. I believe the same is true for a photograph: it brings forth a new image for every person who looks.

And yet, there is one person (or in my case often two) for whom the frame holds something entirely untranslatable: the person who stood inside it. They can never see that photograph objectively, stripped of experience. For them, the image will always be colored by how it felt to exist in that exact second – the heat, the breath, the pulse, and the quiet internal atmosphere of the moment.

All of this – the weather pressing against the body, the structural weight of the room, the unsaid subtext, and the refusal to strip away the human element – is in service of one thing: standing in the room with you on your day, seeing you clearly, and holding the space as it actually is.

I am not there to direct a performance or impose a rigid formula onto your life. I am setting a stage to catch the atmosphere, the physical gravity, and the unhurried truth of how it felt to stand there together – and then stepping back, so the frames can belong entirely to you.