I explore complex interconnections between man, human intervention, the land, and its use in deep time with a focus on today’s landscape. My sculpture and painting process reveals temporary, decomposed, and dissolving conditions that demonstrate the crumbling natural world that we as humans have instigated.

Originally the performance based work gives the sculptures transformative and final shapes. Using corrugated cardboard serves as a cover that once left behind leaves an empty shell of memory from previous actions. 

The disintegrating forms of the body are juxtaposed with the sharper, harsher areas of bold and flat geometric spaces. These shapes are reminiscent of architectural features such as tables, walls, corners, or niches. Each provides its own site-specifity that not only roots each sculpture in place, but also activates the space marking cautionary zones. Those are highlighted in signal colors indicating hazardous or danger zones - areas no longer inhabitable - references of our daily life in traffic, work areas, or environmentally affected areas through human intervention with nature and its surroundings. These contrasting constructions are reduced to an utmost minimization of color and geometrical forms such as circles, squares, rectangles, trapezoids, crosses, or their combinations. 

These sculptures, animated through performative bodywork, recall those myths as updated versions of our current volatile and precarious conditions on Earth. It is important now and for the future to understand landscapes in a new way, to see them differently, not just from what we know. I reflect on man as a producer and destroyer of land as a contemporary landscape, as something that speaks for our current time and the future. What is left are traces of memory, fragmented, and fragile in their existence.

The One-Thousand-Year-Old Olive Tree Project, known as "L’Ulivo Millenario Project," is a profound artistic undertaking that began during my La Baldi Residency in 2024. The project continues to evolve across various media and artistic practices, stemming from a transformative encounter with a thousand-year-old olive tree located on the farm at Poderi Borselli in Montegiovi, Italy. This ancient tree not only inspired a lasting relationship with its natural habitat but also prompted a deep and meaningful exploration of the temporal passage into the land.

The presentation of The L’Ulivo Millenario Project intends to set markers and landmarks through a vast range of visual approaches, such as observational drawings, frottages, monoprints, collages, site-specific installations, and collaborative performances. These approaches create a sense of instability, futuristic exclusion zones, or sci-fi scenarios as a warning for the 21st century and beyond, exposing the threat and danger that humanity poses to itself - an aesthetic visualization that becomes self-encountering.

The project was born out of a sense of wonder and reverence for the thousand-year-old Olivastra tree. This venerable tree became a focal point for artistic creation, embodying geographies, histories, and myths. The encounter with the Olivastra tree evoked a profound sense of Solastalgia—a term capturing the emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change—and a tangible presence through signs, marks, and erasure. This emotional and physical response to the tree's existence is reflected in the spirit of alchemy that permeates the new works, addressing both environmental concerns and hope for the future.

The Olivastra tree, with its millennia-spanning existence, symbolizes the lifeblood of our natural and cultural heritage. My research during the residency in Italy led to the development of a unique iconography centered around this tree. This iconography portrays the tree as a symbol of life and resilience, especially in times of environmental endangerment and the precariousness of our shared ecosystem. The tree stands as a testament to the endurance and adaptability of nature amidst the Anthropocene era—a time marked by significant human impact on the Earth's geology and ecosystems.

The project expresses a prayer for rejuvenation and vitality, juxtaposed with markers and signs of severe environmental threats. The works created under "L’Ulivo Millenario" are grounded in a spirit of alchemy, where art becomes a medium to transform awareness and inspire action. The ancient tree and its surrounding landscape serve as a canvas for exploring themes of survival, societal change, and the risk of depletion.

The project invites collaboration with other artists, scientists, and cultural practitioners to further explore the themes of resilience and transformation. By bringing together diverse perspectives and expertise, "L’Ulivo Millenario" seeks to create a rich, multi-faceted dialogue that enriches our understanding of the natural world and our place within it.

"L’Ulivo Millenario" is more than an art project; it is a meditation on the interconnectedness of life and the environment. It challenges us to reflect on our role within the natural world and to consider the legacy we wish to leave behind. As we navigate the uncertainties of the Anthropocene, this project stands as a testament to the enduring power of nature and the importance of preserving it for future generations. Through the lens of art and its transformative agency, "L’Ulivo Millenario" invites us to contemplate the deeper meanings.

Erratic Landscapes refers to political volatility embedded in motifs of landscapes in precarious conditions attempting a metaphorical language that conveys aesthetic praxis confronting the problematic of temporalities and ends as an ongoing consideration of interconnections between art, politics and environment. They transformed into parables and metaphors of man’s intervention. There is an underscore of subjects in the vast field of land-seizure, exploitation and migration that form a movement between material and metaphor into meaning issuing geopolitical issues deriving from deep-time, history towards concerns of migration and immigration, loss of home and separation. POLYPHEMUS - AFTER CASTING THE ROCK, PERSEPHONE’S LAMENT and GOLDEN SPIKE reflect on various intersections between ancient times and relevance of myths to the current condition on planet Earth.

I process corrugated cardboard, the ubiquitous signature for our globalized consumerism, into large-scale multilayered paintings. Through principles of disappearance, disintegrations, collage and assemblage I reflect on the value of meager paper materials. I share an underlying tale of environmental concerns embedded in tectonic activities that shape and change our landscapes over time and create a new geological anthropocenic layer on top of all other strata.

The three relevant topics of Time, Use of Land and the Global Positioning System intersect between the Anthropocene. They transform into parables and metaphors of man’s intervention and metabolic regimes. There is an underscore of geo-political issues in the vast field of land-seizure, exploitation and migration that form a movement between material and metaphor into meaning issuing geopolitical issues deriving from deep time, history towards concerns of migration and immigration, loss of home and separation.

The sculptures or ‘wraps’ are open by nature. Although titled as ‘Fences’ or ‘Walls’ in fact, they are neither. They are single segments of painted cardboard that build womb-like realms. They are pliable, easily formed with structural cuts, and changeable thus becoming inclusive, exclusive, and interactive in their various forms. In those playful moments when single walls are being grouped together, various dynamic relationships are being formed; one relationship between the elements themselves, and another with the viewer who walks through the room installation. There is an open invitation to walk through the offered surprise openings and around them. 

They are created by the paint and structural cuts with which I transform cardboard, a mundane material, into pliable and movable sculptures. The resulting installation may be individual objects separately, or together in a group. Within the group setting, the segments connect loosely with each other; they interlock, touch, and form openings through which a visitor can walk and obtain new perspectives of the sculptural setting. 

The cardboard segments are painted in metallic and rusty colors. Because of their scale, color and reflection of the metallic surface, they display a strong presence in their environment. The material used is both visibly vulnerable in its imperfection as well as particularly unpretentious, a medium that some may even consider "artless" and simple. I reflect on the suggestion of a "natural" handmade process and reduce the product to its most minimalist expression in color, form and material, thereby forming my own language. By repetition and grouping the individual objects, I achieve ever-changing "statements" without removing the poetry from the results. The "wraps" achieve certain characters and attitudes through their various groupings. They can be moved around by anyone at any time thus resulting in ever-changing scenarios.
 

This series emphasizes abstractions in which several poles initially define the pictorial space, and in which I then – as if seen through a zoom lens – moves closer and closer to the individual posts, culminating in the paintings of the Bold series. In often rather small formats, they show a very close-up, magnified section of a pole. In both “Poles” and “Bold,” it is striking that the poles or their zoomed-in sections are never bordered by straight edges. Through this perspectival distortion, I achieve dynamism and great spatial tension even in my reduced and abstract compositions. The close-up sections of the poles almost seem as if they are about to burst and explode. However, this is not solely due to the convex edges, but is at least equally attributable to a second focus of my work: color. I apply different colors in numerous layers, repeatedly layering them on top of each other. Thus, the steel-gray-bluish or red-yellow surfaces of the “Bold” series have luminous edges where lower layers of color inevitably shine through. The colors vibrate and thus create their own spatiality within the surface of the canvas: spheres of color open up – spaces made of color.

Another development, which does not move towards abstraction but rather delves further into the realm of the representational, can be seen in the two other series, “Event” and “Forest.” The “Events,” created after my trip to California, show vast, open landscapes, marked only at the edges of the image by architectural elements. As if pushed to the side, the architecture here opens up a view of a vast expanse which – again with a very low horizon – provides space for a dramatic spectacle of light. The title "Event" should be understood as a critical commentary. As a global Anglicism, the term refers to large-scale events where participants are animated and entertained. Even small and insignificant events are, for the purpose of better marketing, for example, labeled with this term, which occupies a significant place in our Western entertainment society. I use it here in the sense of an event of a completely different kind: the experience of nature, in which man becomes a silent observer, becomes an "event" for me. 

Also translatable as "process" or "phenomenon," the “Event” paintings capture brief moments in time: where the “Threshold” series addresses the boundaries and transitional areas of the urban landscape, the “Events” depict transitions such as the boundary between light and dark, day and night. Twilight appears in its poetic form as a natural boundary – also full of possibilities and mysteries.

The “Forest” series seems related to the “Events” in a certain way: the architectural elements of wind turbines are placed within the vastness of the landscapes. The title of the series can be understood ecologically: perceived by many as a disruption of the view and a defacement of the landscape, the wind turbines in my work become modern-day forests that contribute to maintaining an ecological balance and at the same time point to the absence of a natural forest in the Post-Anthropocene. 

Stations, Intersections, Malls, Parking Lots, Motels, and Garages: each represents a familiar place that is a part of our everyday life. This familiarity and banality is then juxtaposed with feelings of alienation and also by the strange atmosphere and dramatic contrasts of light, which strengthen the uncertainty of the situation.

Each transitory in nature, these lost spaces incorporate driveways, streets, and bridges that drive the viewer in and out of the painting. Therein lies just a moment, a short break before we continue with our travels through a distant, deep space, and time. The vision expresses the character of transitory moments in a world of restlessness and the hurry of mobility. The settings and the emptiness of spaces retreat into calmness, and accelerate into unexpected vibrancy of light and deep space, where we can take a deep breath before strong dynamic brushstrokes take you out of a deserted manufactured wasteland of alienated poetry.

When I moved to the USA, I decided to exclude the human figure from my paintings. Instead, I developed an awareness of being here and there, now and later, place and space, and space and time by overcoming dynamically deep spaces and deserted places of our everyday life. While time seems to stand still in those familiar looking places like gas stations, intersections, motels, ramps and parking areas, I try to find moments of contemplation, finding a relationship of being in an outside world, which includes an inner world.