Gaze in Flux

The composition is built on one horizontal line: the surface of the water. It divides the canvas into two worlds of colour. Above it, the pale pink of skin against a light turquoise; below it, a cold cyan that deepens into ultramarine towards the lower edge. The line passes exactly through the face, so that the most human part of the body – the eyes – belongs to the water. The hair, painted in long vertical strokes of green, turquoise and dark blue, is no longer hair: it becomes current, plant, root.

I did not want to paint water as a landscape seen from outside, but as an element the person enters and is changed by. In water we are weightless and fragile at once; we trust it, and we are at its mercy. This double nature – shelter and threat, rest and dissolution – is what the painting tries to hold in a single image.