You look for openness, but the hints of figuration are important in your work. How specific does a painting need to be for you, in order for it to “work”? Does it need a relationship with the world as you can observe it? Or could it also be a fully abstract play of forms?

No, not an abstract play of forms. I work towards a form of figuration that is unnameable. I think that because I want it to be many things at the same time, it cannot be one exact thing.

Your palette seems reduced, subdued, as if you push back the colors and prevent them from becoming too shiny or frivolous. Do you know in advance how colors will develop? For instance, do you think in terms of tonality, contrasts, a certain light or atmosphere that you want to attain?

In my early works, my attention was focused mostly on light and dark, in a basic black-and-white ink drawing kind of way. I did not think much in color. In the series Soft Sun, you could say that there is a range from lower to higher color intensity. I still am highly focused on thinking about light and dark, but then I include colors that fit or support that thought. I use a lot of yellow because it gives light from within. White can take the light and suck it up, so I use that a lot, too. What makes the palette reduced is the fact that most colors are mixed and affected by each other. The paint is rather dirty in that way. I am not sure if I can ever make a frivolous painting as bright and shiny as a new car, because I don’t believe life is polished like that.

Some works, like Proximity (2021), seem close to the feeling of drawing. What role does drawing play in your practice? Does every painting start with a drawing? Do you collect ideas for works through making observational drawings?

While I don’t use drawings as sketches for the paintings, I do make sketches as a way of practicing shapes, to free my mind. Because it is faster than painting, it can catch images in between. The spontaneous quality that drawings can have is important; it is a quality I want to reach in painting, too.

From a conceptual viewpoint, it seems that movement and ambiguity are at the heart of your practice. How does technique come into the process? The forms in your work have a natural appearance; things seem to flow as if it all just happens organically. But it is probably not that simple to make things look so easy.

No, but I am glad you think it looks easy. It is a challenging process, and there is a lot of failure along the way. If you work with improvisation, you dive into a process where there is not much to hold on to. That is the most exciting but also the most difficult part. There are highlights along the way that I might have to remove again. What drives me is the ambition to create an original, constructed image that looks like a natural thing. In some parts of the work, I pour paint onto the canvas, which puts the process into motion. It is the part that is untouched by the hand or brush, and it works like a natural phenomenon that becomes a given fact in the painting. I try to materialize the way I see things. In order to get there, I have to make constructional steps, but there are also moments when I need to step back as the author and let the paint do its work.

How do you feel as a painter in the current context, where most people are used to the daily consumption of digital images? What is the drive to work with paint at this moment in history, also considering the abundance of photographical images that surround us?

What I value in painting is the physical aspect of it, the fact that you can see how something is made. It is real, there is a surface that you can enter and follow, there is nothing in between the viewer and the painting. For me it always feels like somebody is there, like a meeting in the flesh instead of on a Zoom call. Digital images are addictive – there is always the next thing. With a painting there is nothing else. It is a real encounter, and therefore it lasts.

You speak about painting as an encounter. If you think of some other painters whose work you appreciate, do you feel that you can read their temperament in the work? Or how do you feel their presence in the work? Is it even desirable that the painter shows up in the work?

I am not sure if it is desirable. I suppose it could be different in other cultures, where the individual is not as celebrated, but of course every painter is present in the work even if they don’t want to be. It is like music: you like a voice or sound, and it makes you feel good, like there is an understanding. The encounter is abstract; it is about meeting through a shared language.