Because of my mother’s frenzy to fashion, I watched and drew from Vogue and other lifestyle magazines at an early age. These magazines sublimated the rawness and exhibition of flesh I was so accustomed to. The contrast between this sublimation of beauty and the reality it tries to produce is at the core of my thinking and work today.

In high school, this led me to focus on persuasive imagery, more specifically those who produce Glamour. As my practice progressed I’ve been focusing on the persuasive visual language(s) used in these images that nurture our envy in the same way as they persuade us to be enviable. A language made to sustain ‘The Politic of Youth’. And this politic of youth is the fabric of Glamour.

Through these investigations I came to understand that the overall effect of these magazines are closely related to certain ideas about freedom and happiness: freedom of choice. Actual information and publicity have fluid borders and tend to run over in each other. They are not merely an assembly of competing messages: it is a language in itself that is always being used to make the same general proposal: making the right choice to be enviable (and eventually be happy). These magazines are about social relations, not objects. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness: happiness as judged from the outside by others. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest - if you do, you will become less enviable. It is this which explains the absent, unfocused look of so many glamour images. (But when I think about the women in the works of the Belgian symbolist Fernand Khnopff, I recognize this same dreaminess, almost a mysterious belonging to a magical reality we can’t see.)

This general proposal turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. The choice of what one eats (or wears or drives) takes the place of a significant political choice. Hence, the gap between what publicity actually offers and the future it promises corresponds with what the spectator-buyer feels himself to be and what he would like to be. The two gaps become one; and instead of the single gap being bridged by action or lived experience, it is filled with glamorous daydreams. Working conditions often reinforces the process. The interminable present of meaningless working hours is "balanced" by a dreamt future in which imaginary activity replaces the passivity of the moment. In his or her daydreams the passive worker becomes the active consumer. The working self envies the consuming self.

In a sense the sum of these lifestyle media add up to a kind of philosophical system. They explain reality in their own terms. They interpret the world. And the daydream is the logic of this system.

This insight brought me to consider the resemblance of that philosophical system with Plato’s World of Forms. To arrange my thinking about the persuasive imagery and conceptualization of lifestyle magazines, I came up with the concept of The Ultimate. It replaces the concept of the Good or the Pure in Plato’s original World of Forms. Historically the Ultimate always referred to God, or the Devine. I adapted it to work on a human level, and in addition The Ultimate works on more levels: as an adjective (the ultimate life, the ultimate man, house, work, love…), as a striving towards something ‘more’, as a moment of actuality, as immortality, as idiosyncratic unity, as a higher culture of objects and people, as potentiality because it can incorporate any possible theme or anecdote in the history of men (when processed till it fits an aesthetic framework) and as said an adapted concept analogue to Plato’s World of Forms.

The Ultimate points to the future, as a concept it keeps moving further away the closer you get to it. It changes each time a new image appears. The Forms in the realm of The Ultimate keep changing, evolving and adapting to new aesthetics and influences. So Plato’s World of Forms is turned upside down to fit The Ultimate. So The Ultimate is a dynamic, while the world of shadows is fixated and longs for dynamics.

In my paintings I create a world where I experiment with the idea that objects (from those magazines) are materialized desires, which are united with the body that longs for them. Thus creating new forms of individuality and self-objectification by recomposing the human models with the commodities, patterns, graphic designs, glossification, styling and other elements from the to-be-looked-at-ness of the same lifestyle magazines: A higher culture of objects and people. By using the elements that add up to their subliminal I conduct an investigation of their properties and the ways in which they interact, combine, and change through an incomplete series of aesthetic re-compositions. I choose a contemporary, ubiquitous visual language that on an artistic level intertwines the mimetic and the formal, culture and nature, system and intuition. This stance has already a great impact on my work and I feel the need to follow it fearlessly wherever it takes me.