In your website you introduce your work saying that you appreciate all artistic expressions, from literature to music. You also name your art “dark symbolist photography”. Which are the roots of your work in the artistic tradition?
I take inspiration from a lot of sources, I mostly like symbolist and surrealist artists, but also Dutch painters like Rembrandt for their aesthetic qualities.. Surrealism, in particular, is interesting in the way it depicts not only what is in nature, but also sentiments and dreams. My work would appear as surrealism, but I prefer the term “symbolism” since I am usually very conscious about what I depict. But subconsciousness also has a lot to say about it, I guess, so I suppose it can be defined as surrealism as well. I don't care about roots and traditions in themselves, but after the work is created it is possible to say what things it resembles from the past. I don't approve of the modernist idea that the past must be discarded, no, there is a lot that can be learned. And I insist not to use the word “art” about what I do, I think it (in its meaning after artifice) is an mere invention of modernism, only a rhetoric to say that Caravaggio and Rothko are the same kind because they are both artists, though nobody would (sincerely) consider them to have more in common than with a house painter.
You consider yourself a philosopher which express his thoughts through pictures and images. Is there any philosopher, or philosophical tradition, that in some way inspired your work?
I am inspired by the likes of Descartes and Kant for their dualism: they express the fundamental separation between the mind and the physical world. Still I think dualism is a very poor substitute for an explanation, raising more questions than it answers, but through time it has come to completely dominate our way of thinking in this part of the world. So our notions of worth, good, evil, meaning etc. is mistaken for axioms. I am not a supporter of the fashionable opposition either, those of monistic determinism, nihilistic relativism, passivity and so on that is usually superficially advocated by the intellectually resigned “intellectual” and cultural elite. In a way my work depicts nightmares about flawed philosophies that I might temporarily adopt and then reject, and the hunt for the ever elusive truth. You could say I am not settled for any one explanation yet.
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