REMAINS. ​

​

The collection began in the Catacombs of Paris, where I walked among the bones of countless people. I felt overwhelmed, saddened, humbled, and deeply inspired. Few places have confronted me so directly with the fragility of life.

Years ago, I chose to study philosophy because I was searching for answers to questions about existence, mortality, and meaning. Even after taking that unconventional path, I still find myself, like many people, looking for distractions from the inevitability of death. In the Catacombs, however, that reality was impossible to avoid.

The Catacombs held more than human remains. Throughout their passages, I encountered poetry, philosophical inscriptions, and words written to give meaning to death and ease its weight. Experiencing these elements together felt like an unexpected illumination emerging from the depths.

Since then, I have been reading, researching, and writing. Through this collection, I now have the opportunity to bring those words into my artistic practice and share them alongside the artworks. It feels as though parts of myself that had long existed separately have finally found one another.
Through Remains, I want to explore what is left behind, not only physically, but through memory, emotion, language, objects, symbols, and the traces of a life once lived.

Each skull begins with this shared reality of mortality, but gradually becomes the portrait of an individual. Every work is created with a particular collector in mind and personalized through elements drawn from them: objects, symbols, gestures, references, or details that speak to their identity, history, interests, or the way I perceive them.

Stripped of the face and appearance we usually associate with portraiture, the individual is reconstructed through what surrounds them and what they leave behind. The skull becomes both universal and deeply personal, a reminder of what we all share and of the singular traces that distinguish one life from another.

Seeing human remains in person allowed me to understand their physical presence in a way that photographs alone could never convey. The visual references used throughout the collection come from the real bones I encountered and documented inside the Catacombs.

Each artwork is intended to exist as a truly singular object, rooted in the reality of existence while carrying something specific of the person it was created for.

I am painting what remains as a reminder that we were here.