This series continues the previous one, in the sense that I build my work in dialogue with AIs — no longer image generators, but interlocutors: the machine critiques, I paint, the trace stays open. I return to the forms I had forbidden myself — the monsters, the naive shapes, the black triangle on blue and matter. Forbidden because too easy, too bare: these are the forms of childhood and of the young painter, kept in the hand beneath the craft. I return to them knowingly, with the years of painting fully assumed, trying to rebuild a vocabulary of my own, to erase any superfluous charm or magic trick, learning from simple forms that radiate an aura, learning to stop early.
These canvases — both series together — span almost five years, a long time for me, who always painted fast. Five years that took away a house, loved ones, my company; landscapes turned into memory-places. My painting becomes abstract for that reason, not as a formal choice: memory is abstract. A memory does not archive, it reconstructs — no perspective, one dominant colour, a mass, a light, half erased, repainted at every recall. Past a certain point in a life, everyone carries an inner world more populated than the world in front of them. That is the one I will paint past my forties: the slow return to the inner world.
The title Hell Can't Be That Bad sets the tone: no alarm, no nostalgia, no lament. The world has already tipped over, mine too; and that observation rests me instead of frightening me, like pressure easing once the die is cast.