Artist Statements
Country’s Club
If you pass by a private golf course, and if no one stops you, take a peek through the guarded perimeter of thick hedges and high fences. If successful, you’ll see freshly mowed fairways, manicured putting greens, smooth sand traps, reflective water hazards, a stylish clubhouse, and perhaps a couple of its members zipping around in their golf cart. For that moment, you will have witnessed the exclusive and elusive world of the Country Club.
The country club and its golf course is a modern-day arcadia where its scenery seems to be at perfect equilibrium. Yet behind its idyllic veneer, the country club conceals a host of problems involving our environment, our economy and our overall wellbeing. Its golf courses spawn environmental issues contributing to increased global temperatures and decreased bio-diversity. Made of artificial landscapes that forever alter and destroy natural habitats—their insatiable need to keep their turf as Scottish-green as possible—golf courses remorselessly deplete and pollute precious local water resources. Scrupulously clean and impeccable, well-tended links and grounds freely use pesticides and fertilizers that exterminate wildlife. In their reconfiguration of the landscape, country club golf courses generate vast amounts of waste and destruction, without any consideration for the surrounding flora, fauna or human inhabitants. All of this, so the well-to -do can putt their dimpled white ball into a tiny hole.
Indeed, country clubs represent some of the most (un)fairways we are facing today. Aside from the destruction of our planet, they embody the rising inequality and injustice between the 1% and the 99%, the haves and have-nots. Clearly, country club memberships that are upwards of $500,000 in initiation fees and $25,000 in annual dues are emblematic of our ever-increasing income-disparity issues.
On the links, or inside the clubhouse, country club members make business and financial deals, advance political agendas and create alliances that serve only their personal interests and that of their corporations. The non-members of this Country’s Club, meaning the rest of us, are excluded from and more importantly never considered in decisions made at the “19th hole” bar.
In any large city in America, we may pass by a country club never knowing what kind of development is behind that thick hedge and high fence. Presently, the ominous plot continues to remain intact until one day an errant golf ball flies over the perimeter and hits a sensible yet unforgiving civilian…
Lie/Lay
Despite their aggression toward nature and each other, human beings are fragile animals.
In this series of life-size nudes, I explore poses in which the figures could either be at rest, exercising, meditating or simply be dead. The lack of background and of shadows emphasizes the abstract quality of the figures and the uncertainty of the situation.
Are these figures lying or have they been laid? Lie or lay? It will be up to the viewer to decide.
Beach Series
Human beings are from far this planet’s most dangerous animals.
Whatever the circumstances may be, humans often seem prone to latent violent behavior.
Indeed, people, even when engaged in unassuming leisurely activities, always seem to retain their potential for hostility while conserving their “civilized” –read domineering- accoutrement.
The underlying antagonism of individuals is directly linked to their irremediable rupture with their natural past. In today’s world, they are neither entirely wild nor entirely enlightened. And as a result, they express that inadequacy with sometimes fear and often resentment.
This anger can be aimed at other human beings, other animals or at the environment in general. It can be expressed in an obvious and direct manner, or in a more subtle and indirect fashion.
The figures in this series exemplify, despite themselves, these inherent human emotions of fear and anger.
By entering their space, we too become subject to this endless cycle of distrust and violence.
Word Play
Originally encountered in Dada, Cubism, Surrealism, Pop and Conceptual Art, the association of text and images has become one of the most ubiquitous communication devices of our contemporary society.
Smaller-sized and painted in a photorealistic manner, this series playfully blurs the distinctions between art and advertisement, between the conceptual and the material. At the same time, it revels in the displacement of reality encountered in our understanding of objects, words and images.