From a distance, these paintings are not what they seem: they might resemble blurred airbrushed surfaces, electronic prints, or even spontaneous pours of paint. Only at a closer look can one fully appreciate their irregular materiality or understand their method of modular production. The work draws from the repetition of weaving, Islamic tiling, and the pixel-based production of digital images to create such illusions. The surfaces of the paintings are covered with small pixel-like marks applied according to a grid, but hand made with a brush. - I mix colors with medical syringes yielding formulas in millimeters for any given color. It is my attempt to quantify color. - A play between the irregular and the systematic resonates in all of the work.

Thinking about the constant replication of images through mechanical reproduction, I make groups of nearly identical twin and triplet paintings. Since an image nowadays rarely exists in one form, I like the idea of presenting two or more such options to the viewer simultaneously. These ‘identicals’ might vary in size or slightly in color or tint. This latter variation in color is achieved by painting two identical paintings on two different painting using an asterisk-shaped pixel. (Pour Painting and Copy, 2002) ( SECOND ROW OF IMAGES FROM TOP - detail far right.) - uniformly colored grounds. Recent duplicate paintings include a ‘digital’ copy of a poured he Pour Painting, completed in a few minutes refers to the expressionist tradition of the material accident. Such spontaneity is an attempt to intimate “nature,” that space prior to consciousness. The Copy, on the other hand, took hundreds of hours to complete. Fingernail sized asterisks cover the surface in an attempt to painstakingly replicate the complex color shifts of the Pour Painting. The Copy is bound to fail: its dutiful complexity never equals that of its counterpart. But the attempt to complete it allows one to appreciate the arbitrariness of the original with renewed attention.

Another set of twins (With and Without a Grid, 2003) ( TOP ROW IMAGES - detail far right ) presents two almost identical paintings of thin vertical lines of asterisks, one painted over a pencil-drawn grid, and a second painted free hand. The latter goes askew, creating an almost three-dimensional pattern of waviness. Initially, one is struck by how similar they seem, but a prolonged viewing only underscores the disparity. Besides heightening the viewers’ perceptual experience, the multiple paintings subtly question Western easel paintings’ entrenchment within a single fixed frame, demanding that the viewer consider each painting as contingent. Neither twin is the ‘true’ painting. By trying to contain and map perception, these works address the human, although futile, search for a rational and measurable world, a place where absolutes would exist. But the fluidity of perception ultimately affirms the contingency of being.