In this series of portraits, I look at the face as a place of presence, but also as a surface crossed by invisible forces. Around these portraits, the paint gradually frees itself from representation. I see these abstract passages as a possible expression of the person's inner state.
They give visible form to what usually remains invisible: the emotions, tensions, contradictions, memories or intimate movements that make up a human being. Where we see a presence, abstraction suggests what drives it, runs through it or escapes it. A relationship then forms between what can be recognised and what cannot be named. The face seems both to break away from the abstract material and to extend into it, as if the boundaries between appearance and inner life were becoming uncertain.
