Statement

Ideas often come to me when I can’t sleep. In that suspended state, unrelated images begin to connect, and anxiety turns them into scenarios that feel absurd, threatening, and strangely inevitable. My dreams return again and again to themes of collapse, pursuit, disorientation, and loss of control.

When I wake up, I think about how quickly the impossible can become normal, and how quickly a person can adapt to that new reality. Grief, instability, and loss do not necessarily stop everyday life. We still eat, sleep, go to work, follow familiar routines, and make plans, even when the world we knew has already changed.

When one of these images develops into an idea for a painting, I place Barbie in the role of the main character. For me, she is a familiar and deeply personal image of an optimistic person, and in particular, of myself.

Since childhood, Barbie has represented for me an almost unattainable concentration of beauty. What attracts me most now is her strange invulnerability. Even if her hair is pulled out, her face is drawn on, or her legs are chewed up, she still remains beautiful and keeps smiling. There is something amusing, unsettling, and almost supernatural in this persistence, as though what happens to her body cannot touch her essence. She seems to exist slightly above physical reality, looking at each new catastrophe with a kind of irony: “All right. What else?”

In my paintings, she moves through catastrophes with the same composure. She continues getting ready, posing, balancing, or simply existing while the world around her becomes unstable. Through her, I explore the mechanisms that allow a person to keep going: denial, habit, optimism, adaptation, and the search for something that can still provide support when familiar structures begin to collapse.

I am interested in the idea that resilience does not always look heroic. Sometimes it appears through repetition, everyday routines, irrationality, or even absurdity. I return to Barbie again and again because she embodies this contradiction: seemingly fragile, artificial, and idealized, yet somehow indestructible. I dream of that kind of calm, where the world can change beyond recognition and something inside me can still remain a source of support.