AM: How is the socio-anthropological dimension in which you operate – your here-and-now – and how crucial is it in your art-making? In other words, how can we read your works without necessarily resorting to age-old categories more or less tied to art history or religion? So how do you reflect on your reality – the political and cultural environment – and, most importantly, what inspires your most typical Iconoclasm?
NS: Imagine you suddenly find yourself in a familiar place that you can hardly recognise. My works try to capture that moment of slow recollection against a backdrop of pure alienation.
I look at things as from an afterlife viewpoint, separated from my time, but without feeling nostalgic towards the past. Insisting on being contemporary is somehow tantamount to writing an expiration date on one’s work.
In this sense, my iconoclastic stance is just a passionate act of translation. I believe that some works of art need to go through a downfall, a catastrophe, if they want to find some fresh, new blood.
AM: A dialectic of desire is always at stake in your works which implies alterity, distance, separation, loss as well as a certain amount of Sadism. The way you handle, manipulate and eventually distort your works by literally ripping them open and pushing them to their furthest extremes shares more than one point of contact with the sadistic tendency to inflict suffering upon a victim beyond life and death. The sadist is required to be apathetic but his apathy is not an end in itself; rather, it points to the quest for something that transcends it. Do you recognize the connection? Which is the prescribed acme of your paintings, their ultimate goal?
NS: I try to overload my paintings with anxiety, but to do so, I always need body, a simulacrum to start with. Once this body is built – either entirely or partially – I start assaulting it with an escalation of vicious strategies.
It is not just a sadistic momentum since its masochistic flip side arises shortly after. This is obviously due to the fact that I spoil and undo my own work, as well as the time and the attention I devoted to it. What really matters to me is creating images as equally transfixing as thorns in the eye of the viewer.