Loose Index

My work circles around images that feel half-remembered, half-constructed—like something unearthed from an archive you were never meant to access. I build paintings from fragments: genealogical materials, early internet blogs, screenshots, and photographs of subcultures that linger on the fringes. These sources are edited, distorted, and layered until they detach from their original context. What remains is something unstable, drifting between fact and fiction, secrecy and exposure.

I’m interested in how meaning shifts when images are removed from their original contexts and placed in new ones. By reworking personal archives and culturally peripheral material, I explore how images are shaped not just by their content, but by the conditions and frameworks through which they are viewed. Some paintings feel intimate, others veer toward discomfort. Figures often avert their gaze, and settings appear both familiar and subtly wrong. These compositional tensions prompt viewers to consider not just what they’re seeing, but how they are participating in its construction.

Visually, my influences range from Romanticism and illuminated manuscripts to the glow of digital screens and the tactile fragmentation of fresco. I work in segmented layers, applying oil over vibrant flashe underpaintings to create surfaces that are fractured, deliberate, and time-conscious. Each canvas acts as a system of references, moods, and embedded codes that invite extended looking and layered interpretation.

These works aren’t puzzles to be solved. They operate more like echoes—fragments of personal memory or cultural residue that remain unresolved. I’m less concerned with clarity than with cultivating a space for ambiguity, unease, and critical attention.

Halmayres_03′, 2024, Oil, acrylic, and flashe on canvas