“I provide information, but I am not a journalist. I make poetic things, but I am not a poet either. My work is on the edge of these two.” — Yto Barrada’s words resonate deeply with me. My art offers a window to the world’s injustices and absurdities. Through layered narratives in my paintings, I create a new reality—an allegory, a dream, or a polyphony. 

By deconstructing dominant narratives, I present a subjective commentary, inviting viewers to reconsider what they see and explore deeper meanings beyond the surface of familiar images.

In recent years, Saint Wilgefortis, the bearded and crucified saint, venerated from the 13th to the beginning of the 20th century, has taken a special place. She was erased from our collective memory after she was excommunicated by the church. Yet she was the patron saint for family problems and abused women. A feminist icon who already broke through gender roles at that time. Her attitude and protest inspired me to look at and use rebellious women and the female representation in our current times and her history brought me to the primeval or bird goddess and the rotation of the feminine to the masculine god principle.

In addition to or in relation to this, there are my ‘flying dreams’ that are very important for my latest paintings. For some time now I have been delving into the symbolic meaning of this. Some flying figures were ‘painted’ with brick powder, which created a contrast between that earthly material, very subject to gravity, and the desire to escape that materiality, to become light. In other ink drawings a flying woman is taken along by a flying raven, a dark patch. In some later paintings I place the flying, sometimes hairy figure in a situation in which she sometimes flies over, overlooks, or flees a spectacle, withdraws from it. That spectacle is one that does not exist itself, an apparent reality, consisting of parts from various existing situations. Put in a fiction that in turn tells just as much about the reality that surrounds us.