Pain In Flatness

A scar is proof of pain. Blisters, burns and scars mark the places where the skin failed to protect the body, and where it began to heal. But a scar only hurts while it belongs to someone. Pain belongs to the living. Take away the body and a wound is just a mark.

Pain in Flatness starts at that limit. The prints record the growth of an imagined scar, stage by stage, like a medical file for an organism that doesn't exist. The process mirrors the injury: the plate is scratched, bitten by acid and pressed into paper, and every stage leaves its trace. In Dutch, druk means both pressure and print. Zwelling, Weefsel, Huid, Druk, Defigurement (swelling, tissue, skin, pressure, disfigurement): the titles read like a diagnosis.

The images are abstract and flat. There is no body and no nerve, nothing that can feel. Yet the eye recognizes the surface of a wound and responds to it anyway, flinching at a scar that cannot hurt. That is where the work lies: in the moment a flat image is treated as something alive enough to suffer.

Etching, aquatint, drypoint, lithography and monotype, 2023–2024