SILENT MELANCHOLY AND RESTLESS VANITY

In Silent Melancholy and Restless Vanity , I revisit motifs that have been used for centuries in Vanitas and Melancholy paintings - skulls, drapery, flowers, glass, candles, and fruit - and reinterpret them within a contemporary context. A refined sense of irony and an ongoing play with reflections and distortions are central to my visual language in this series.

The heavy velvet curtains found in classical Vanitas paintings become contemporary textiles in my work, transformed into polka-dotted fabrics or shimmering silver-colored surfaces. Human skulls are replaced by animal skulls. Glass globes, another recurring element in Vanitas painting, are approached with a lighter and more playful sensibility. In Bosch - Earthly Delights , the glass globe captures a distorted and illusory reflection of a strange, exotic giraffe and of Adam and Eve, as depicted in Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.

In my more recent paintings from 2025 and 2026, redcurrants—symbol of vitality, fertility, and joie de vivre—are juxtaposed with references to death. In Ribes rubrum pro A. Coorte they appear alongside a skull, while in Toccata/Stigmata – after Albrecht Bouts, 2026, they are placed in relation to a Man of Sorrows. In Pompeii - Carpe Diem, a skeleton from a Pompeian mosaic is given a grotesque makeover.

In another work - Smiley - a reflection in a globe takes the form of, exactly, a smiley.

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