Qualia I

Breakthrough Works: The Emergence of Qualia

2010–2011

These two paintings, Chant of the Dragon Woman and Underwater Dreams, represent the moment Qualia took shape, not only as a thematic inquiry, but as a painterly and conceptual methodology. Completed between late 2010 and 2011, they mark a decisive break from my earlier works of impasto neo expressionism using oils. Here, the surface becomes a site of collision: between the figurative and the abstract, the symbolic and the sensorial, the seen and the felt.

In both works, I deployed a deeply reflective, slowly built, layered mixed media process. It's where I first attempted merging drawing, painting, scraping, and textural saturation, where bodily form is excavated rather than depicted. These are hybrid creatures as much as ontological thresholds. Myth bleeds into matter. Identity is always mid-metamorphosis. The qualia -the raw feel of experience- replaces iconography as the primary content.

Underwater Dreams (2011)

180x150cm

Pastel, oils, encaustic and mixed media on canvas

Dragon Woman (2010)

70x80cm

Pastel, oils and mixed media on canvas

Pilgrim-Ouroboros (2012)

70x50cm

Pastel and mixed media on paper

Sphinx (2011)

100x70cm

Pastel and mixed media on paper

Ouroboros II (2015)

40x40cm

Ink, pastel and mixed media on paper

Animal (2012)

100x70cm

Pastel and mixed media on paper

Chrysalis (2012)

130 x 90cm

Pastel and mixed media on canvas

Fusion (2015)

135x50cm

Charcoal, Ink and mixed media on paper

Mirror Stage (2012)

100x70 cm

Pastel and mixed media on paper

Captives (2012)

180 × 130 cm

Oil on canvas,

In Captives, the body is imprisoned in its own unbearable materiality.

Working on this painting for more than 3 years, it underwent a number of metamorphoses and was finally finished in oil colours, losing the mixed media, layered and dialectic qualities of the other works in the series.

For years I considered the work a failure.

In Captives, torsos and limbs knot together in impossible configurations, neither struggling nor at peace. There is no escape here, only enclosure. The figures are bound by each other’s flesh and by the logic of their own volume.

Lit with an eerie, almost staged green light, the background isolates the scene like a dissected memory. In place of a landscape, an operating table, a psychic theatre. Smooth forms, reminiscent of classical sculpture or 19th century realist painting, are ruptured by openings, folds, and unnatural details: fingers cradling a faceless head, genital ambiguity refusing categorization. Here, I evoke Michelangelo’s Prisoners reimagined through the lens of Bataille, or Hans Bellmer’s dolls stripped of all seduction.

This painting stands as a statement of intent rather than painterly achievement: It encapsulates the Qualia series' core concerns: the limits of bodily coherence, the collapse of subjecthood, the horror and intimacy of form. The flesh not as merely a totemic symbol but as prison and chains.

Sleeping Beauty (2013).Pastel and mixed media on canvas

Squirm (2012). Pastel and mixed media on canvas

Reclining figures

2013

168 x 110cm

Pastel and mixed media on paper

Oaths of Narcisuss (2014)

130 x 95 cm

Acrylic, pastel and mixed media on canvas

In Oaths of Narcisuss, the act of looking turns against itself. The central figure, hunched and dissolving, leans over its reflection (or perhaps its double) subsumed in a field of liquid surface, blurred outlines, and broken light. The traditional myth is invoked only to be undone: a moment of vanity ...and entrapment. The self is admired, absorbed, pulled downward into image.

The palette, dominated by bruised purples, visceral reds, toxic blues, and diffused yellows, feels unstable, like something seen underwater or under anesthesia. Drips and scratches cut across the body like evidence of its own undoing. The mirror does not offer identity. It becomes a membrane between perception and dissolution.

The “oath” in the title suggests a binding, a promise or sentence willingly entered. In this painting, the figure becomes bound not by myth, but by vision, by the impossibility of separating subject from surface.

Untitled (2015). Mixed media on canvas, 150 x 150 cm

This work marks the culmination of the first Qualia series

It's the work where my creative process reached a peak: All the dipoles I was striving to balance simultaneously in previous work, like improvisation and construction, colour and form, brushstroke and line, western and eastern influence, representation and abstraction, randomness and control, materiality and subject have fallen into place.

Also, it is one of my last large-scale physical paintings before the rupture in my career that came between 2015 and 2021.