Their look is closer to Israeli than Chinese she used to tell me and that I would like the food. I was specifically interested, as my wife, although mainland Chinese, was born in Xinjiang, in Korla and I have heard much about the Turkic peoples where she was born. It was really quite remarkable, a once in the life time experience. This invitation also gave you the opportunity to visit the province of Xinjiang which is home of the Uyghur, an ethnic minority that primarily practices Islam. You were recently invited by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chengdu in China to a group exhibition under the title “Memory Goes As Far As This Morning”. For me the act of erasing is as important and positive as a mark making. I’m interested in reversing this process, everything else comes first and then leave an opening, a question mark. We ‘read’ each other and any human portrait, by first and for-most our facial features and then everything else.
Our mannerism, style, the way we dress, walk etc. “I was and still am fascinated by how much information we gather between us that is outside the face.” As my work shifted back to portraiture, I found out fairly quickly that I can describe what I need without the features. Painting old toys I was reacting to the physical erasure of the doll features after years of being handled and played with kids. When I began erasing the facial features it was something altogether different. In my work I try to strike a balance between the general and the specific, the ‘public’ and the ‘individual’, which I find fascinating. Growing up I was fascinated by the little figures in my grandfather’s landscape paintings just little blobs of paint to describe a face, limbs or body. More than anything it’s an abstraction tool, a way I enjoy directing and dissecting what I see and the surface of the painting. What is the reason, the intention behind these portraits without features? Being a sort of « craftsman of memories », each of your paintings has this incomplete detail of faceless human beings.
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