Self-Portrait, Playing

Self-Portrait, Playing returns Painting–Music Fusion to its most fundamental source: the body.

Before music becomes color, structure, or image, it is first heard, performed, and physically experienced. In this self-portrait, the cello is not simply an instrument beside the artist; it becomes an extension of listening, rhythm, and bodily memory.

Painting and music meet here before any formal system of translation begins. Gesture, sound, movement, and perception pass through the same body, revealing that artistic transformation is not only an intellectual process, but a lived one.

The work asks where translation truly begins: in a system of signs, or in the body that first experiences them.