Almost a decade ago, I sat on a tractor equipped with a small tank and painted—or more precisely, I drove the tractor forward and back, repeatedly, over a 165-foot (50-meter) length of canvas. The surface was marked by paint flowing from a series of holes in a pipe attached to the tank, running like fertilizer, herbicide, or water. I knew this kind of work—the careful control of the tractor, the constant looking forward and back, the patience and attentiveness that an otherwise apparently simple operation requires. As a teenager, I worked on farms, doing a variety of tasks. Tractor driving was something I knew: a mode of being outdoors, a deep memory held in my body and on my skin. My process-based works are inspired by the tradition of Dutch landscape painting. Rather than representing the landscape, I aim to reconnect with it through memory—a kind of time capsule containing accumulated experiences and impressions.
My paintings are large-scale and often characterized by saturated colors, geometric shapes, repetitive patterns, and the folding of the canvas. Through this foldedness, I invite viewers to think about time and painting in a different way. A fold interrupts flatness, enclosing volume so that the painting’s surface is understood as pliable—something that can be packed and unpacked, existing in both stretched and unstretched formats. The tractor’s movement back and forth across the length of the canvas—its tracking—was the first in a range of methods I developed to mark the canvas without a traditional brush.
I am interested in the ways paint can be used to create marks, inscriptions, and gestures through non-traditional applications. Using tools such as backpack sprayers and brooms, I employ a wide range of working instruments both inside and outside the studio. I understand my “painting” as a process of carrying out specific actions, allowing the vicissitudes of paint to become visible. Some works are executed outdoors, where weather also plays an active role. The resulting canvases expose the process, the tools, the materials, and the act of movement itself.
Whatever the means used, all my works to date are grounded in an attention to process as something that unfolds over time—as a procedure involving the performance of specific, often repetitive actions across the canvas. While continuing to work within the tradition of the painted canvas, I remain committed to exploring new ways of taking painting beyond the easel.
2026
Basel, Switzerland