This series starts with PVC banners I find in the street: commercial signs and event advertisements, large surfaces designed to be seen from a distance and forgotten the moment they stop being relevant.
What gets painted over is not erased. The original image stays in the work, often more than the finished piece reveals at first glance. Fragments from the underlying print continue to operate beneath the paint, sometimes legibly, sometimes only as an undertone. The two surfaces, the industrial print and the painting on top, end up locked into each other.
I'm interested in what this kind of half-buried image does to perception. The brain encounters something partially visible and starts working – filling in what's missing, constructing meaning out of what isn't fully there. This is something we do constantly and rarely notice. Here it becomes the subject of the work. The moment the viewer catches themselves constructing a form or a narrative from partial cues, their own perceptual machinery becomes visible. Not the image, but the act of seeing itself.
Pattern recognition is the same operation now being performed at scale by artificial intelligence. The intuitive and imperfect human process of finding meaning in fragments is becoming a global automated system, and where that system is heading is closer to science fiction than science. We are inside a scenario that would have been speculative fiction not long ago: a race toward something that promises either the disappearance of suffering at scale or the end of the species that built the technology. Which way it goes depends on human qualities that don't automate well – the kind of attention that can fold back on itself and notice, from inside, how a mind is operating.
That kind of self-aware attention is what these works are built around. They create a situation where slowing down becomes possible. In that deceleration there is something no algorithm replicates.