De/Composed Narratives, since 2014

In this ongoing series, I use photographs from found family albums as raw material for paintings. Each canvas assembles several photo albums that belonged to one person or family. To create the “paint”, I divide each photograph into its visual components by cutting out all the people, objects, and other elements depicted. Decomposed and applied on a canvas, the photographs are turned into splashes of paint and stereotyped shapes. The individual life story of an anonymous person, recorded in his or her family albums, is transformed into a collection of abstract and iconic forms, which melt together into a “spaceless noise”. As we approach the paintings, our eyes “learn to detect” objects even if their context is missing. Just like image recognition software, we start to recognize people and objects based on their outlines, typical colors, and shapes. The material I use for this series belongs to an era when photographic memories were archived at home in shoeboxes and family albums. What will happen to all the visual fragments of everyday life that we share and store online today? How will image recognition software of the future make sense of this visual noise produced in our era?