My artistic practice stems from a desire to make perceptible subjectivities kept at the margins of visibility, existences whose presence is simultaneously acknowledged and continually diminished by dominant regimes of representation. Through portraiture—conceived as a critical device rather than a simple transcription—I progressively tighten the framing until I produce forms of almost intrusive proximity. Painting and sculpture thus become spaces of tension where an unstable, suspended image is elaborated. I seek to bring forth an intermediate zone, a threshold where the dynamics of visibility and erasure, of memory and forgetting, are reenacted. The portrait then acts as a form of altered duplication: a twin figure. As a twin, this question of the double profoundly permeates my work; it prompts a reflection on repetition, variation, and disjunction, as if each work were attempting to produce another presence, at once familiar and irreducibly foreign.

The figures I evoke—Black people rooted in New Orleans traditions, refugees, veterans, individuals experiencing mental health challenges, women artists—do not belong to a typology but rather to a constellation of situated experiences. My aim is less to reproduce a likeness than to capture emotional intensities, states of tension, forms of vulnerability and resistance. The pictorial material then becomes a vehicle for an expressiveness that transcends mere figuration, while sculpture extends this exploration by giving form to presences that are both embodied and fragmentary. The goal is to shift the gaze, to compel it to linger in zones of indeterminacy where identities cannot be fixed but appear as processes in flux, traversed by multiple and sometimes contradictory narratives.

My work resonates with Alice Neel’s approaches, in that it questions the social and psychological constructions of identity. Like this artist, I consider portraiture as a space for negotiation between interiority and projection, between categorization and reinvention. Where Alice Neel engages in a direct, empathetic relationship with her subjects, my work attempts to articulate a dual dynamic: making marginalized presences visible while simultaneously challenging the very frameworks of their visibility. The result is works that do not present a stable identity, but rather open up a field of possibilities, where the subject is refracted, reinterpreted, and reconfigured within a constitutive instability.