Painting without brushes

The decision did not begin as a rejection of technique. It began with a recurring dream in which I was painting inside Bruno&Polli’s without brushes, palette knives or tools. There was only my body, the paint and the resistance of the surface. When I woke, the dream felt less like an image than an instruction.

A brush can be precise, but it can also become a place to hide. The hand leaves different evidence. It presses, drags, hesitates, scratches and releases. Every mark contains the weight and speed of the moment in which it was made. The palm covers; the fingertips interrupt; the side of the hand cuts through a layer that had begun to settle.

Working this way does not mean abandoning intention. Before painting, I write the emotional atmosphere of each work: its tension, colours, movement and the feeling it should leave behind. The plan is a score rather than a drawing. Once the first contact is made, the body is allowed to answer it.

The paintings in What the Hands Couldn’t Keep Quiet are therefore neither spontaneous decoration nor representations of particular events. They are physical records of memory, control, rupture, desire, absence and return. The canvas does not illustrate the body. It keeps its evidence.

“I wanted to know what the body would say if the mind stopped correcting it.”