Moored next to my studio I see her almost every day, lonely, compelling and beautiful.

I have never passed her side without stopping and wandering closer to her large hips, warm and shiny surface, mysterious rooms and gaping holes. I have tried sometimes to figure out her entire shape, as if I wanted to gain a better understanding of what she really was. What are you? Who are you? Could you move and show me the other side?

Long before I had thought of the show, I was already looking for elements that would nourish and enlarge my practice. I was not going to paint her in a presumed realistic way; but trying to refine her specific nature, I was looking for tensions, echoes, thoughts and emotions. My paintings Winter Current and The Bow reunite water, light and earth. These paintings emerge from the real world, yet they tend to the universal, it is not Iris’s bow, but The Bow. In Winter Current, the waters between show two capacities; these gaping holes are becoming a recurring subject of my practice.

I have painted the sea with the very same motives, to show it’s entire and true nature, from bottom to surface, to see through and reveal the invisible. When I say that I dedicate my show to Iris, I am talking about Iris the female boat, the friend, the reflective conscious, the one who struggled and that so many admire, the one that carries hope. She inspired the work and triggered new visual challenges.

In this show she is in and out the paintings, in my mind and at work, opening into new areas. Now imagine you embark on Iris, liberated and free to sail across many a sea. Questioning new landscapes, her to be with you, as she has been with me. To visit or revisit what has been and will be, the joy and trouble, the telling of two tales in one.