Let's start with you as a person, before we get to the artist. Your practice speaks through fruit and vegetables almost as if they were a language, each color and form carrying its own meaning. So I want to turn that language toward you, before anything else. If you had to choose one fruit or vegetable that represents who you are, which one would it be, and why?
Definitely the papaya. It has been my symbol since I was 18, when I first started doing street art and chose it almost instinctively as my signature. Beyond being my favourite fruit, I see the papaya as a powerful feminine symbol. I always say, “Papaya is the new banana.” The banana has been an icon for decades, in art and popular culture, with its obvious masculine associations. I like the idea that now it's the papaya's time. It's time for women to take that space.
You called this collection the beginning of your mature artistic journey. That's a strong claim to make about a body of work, it draws a line and says: before this, and after this. So I'm curious what actually changed. Was it something in how you paint, in what you allow yourself to say, or in how you see yourself as an artist? What tells you that this is where the "before" ends?
I think the shift is less about suddenly becoming a different artist, and more about finally recognising the territory I want to keep investigating. Before Slices of Life, I experimented a lot, and that experimentation was essential. But with this collection, for the first time, everything started to come together into one coherent language. That's why I see it as the beginning of a more mature phase in my practice. Not because I feel I have arrived somewhere, but because I have finally found a research direction that feels completely mine, aesthetically, conceptually and personally.
This is the work that marks that shift. I'd like to understand where it actually comes from: how did Slices of Life enter your life? Was there a specific moment, an image, a question that started pulling you in this direction, or was it something that built up slowly without you noticing at first?
It actually started many years before Slices of Life became a collection. As a teenager, I remember looking very closely at an orange. I suddenly realised that, despite having eaten hundreds of them, I had never really looked at one. I was almost moved by its structure; each segment made of hundreds of tiny juice-filled sacs, contained within one another. The closer I looked, the more complex it became. Enlarging it allowed me to enter that world through painting, and made me wonder what I would discover if I looked at other fruits and vegetables with the same attention.
One of the paradoxes at the heart of this work is that fruit and vegetables are now available all year round, which sounds like abundance, but it has cut us off from the rhythm of the seasons that used to shape daily life for everyone, and behind that there's something bigger, how far we've pushed nature to bend to us. I'm curious how you personally carry the weight of that shift. Do you feel it as an artist, as a person living through it, or both? And do you believe your work can actually ease something in the viewer, even in a small way, or is it more about naming the wound than healing it?
I feel it both as an artist and as a person. We've become so used to having everything available at any time that we've almost forgotten that nature has its own timing. Seasonality is part of a much larger system of rhythms, cycles and connections, and by constantly bending those rhythms to our needs, we risk forgetting that we are part of that system too. I don't believe a painting can heal that disconnection, but I do believe it can shift our attention. If something we normally consume almost automatically can make us stop, look closely and rediscover the complexity and intelligence of nature, then a small reconnection has already happened.
There's something that strikes me about this work: you're painting a world where consumption has become continuous, instant, with no more waiting, no more anticipation, and yet the way you ask us to look at your paintings is the opposite. You want a slow, contemplative gaze, layered glazes built up over time, an image that only reveals itself if you stop and actually look. It feels almost like you're trying to give back what the world you're describing has taken away. Is that a deliberate response on your part, restoring the waiting through the act of painting and looking itself?
Yes, although it wasn't entirely deliberate at first. The process of making these paintings naturally requires the opposite of immediacy. I work through layers and glazes, slowly building colour, depth and detail. Spending so much time observing a single fruit or vegetable becomes almost an exercise in attention itself. Over time, I realised that the process was reflecting the concept behind the work. We live in a culture that constantly removes waiting. We consume food, images and information almost instantly, while these paintings ask both me and the viewer to do the opposite: to stay, observe and allow something to reveal itself gradually.
There's a bodily dimension in this work that goes even deeper than the cellular reading you mentioned. When you enlarge an orange to reveal its filaments, it doesn't just read as a cell under a microscope, at a certain scale it starts to look like the human body itself, like veins, like nerves. It's as if the microcosm and the macrocosm were speaking to each other through the same segments. Do you feel that connection, between the fruit's body and our own, is something we need to consciously renew right now, in a moment of global crisis, rather than let it quietly disappear?
Absolutely. This connection between scales has become one of the most fascinating parts of the research for me. The more I research complex systems and networks in nature, the more intrigued I am by how similar patterns and forms can emerge at completely different scales. It reminds me that nature is not a collection of separate objects, but a deeply interconnected system, and that our bodies belong to that same system. What strikes me most is that these similarities are already present in what surrounds us. Through observation and scale, these connections gradually become visible. At that point, a slice of fruit stops being only a slice of fruit; it becomes a way of looking at how life organizes itself.
I keep coming back to the title, Slices of Life, because these are objects we usually take completely for granted, something you'd cut without a second thought and eat in thirty seconds. And yet in your paintings they become almost monumental, enlarged, elevated, treated with the same care you'd give to a portrait. What happens when you decide that something this ordinary deserves to be looked at that closely?
I think the act of giving something ordinary that much attention changes its value. Something ephemeral becomes monumental and permanent. That contrast is very important to Slices of Life. By isolating and enlarging these fragments, I want to give them the kind of presence we usually reserve for subjects we consider significant. The title comes from that idea too: they are literally slices of living matter, but each slice can also become a window into something much larger.
This need for a slower, more grounded relationship with nature isn't just something I sense in your paintings; it's visible everywhere right now, especially online: slow living, seasonal eating, people romanticizing the idea of growing their own food. Do you see Slices of Life as part of that same cultural wave, and if so, how do you feel about your work sitting alongside a trend that's also, in its own way, very online and very curated?
I think there is definitely a shared sensitivity, but I don't see Slices of Life as coming from the slow-living trend itself. To me, the popularity of seasonal eating, gardening and slower ways of living reflects a wider desire to reconnect with rhythms and experiences that contemporary life has gradually distanced us from. At the same time, there is an interesting contradiction in the fact that even this desire for slowness is often experienced through fast, highly curated digital platforms. Nature itself can become another aesthetic to consume. I don't necessarily see that as negative. It simply reflects the complexity of the moment we're living in, and I'm part of that contradiction too.
So to close, I want to ask you something simple but not small. If Slices of Life could actually change something, even in one person, what would you hope for? Not admiration for the paintings, but something that shifts in how they live, how they eat, how they pay attention, once they walk away.
I would hope for something very simple: curiosity. Maybe the next time someone cuts an orange, they pause for a second before eating it and actually look at what is inside; the membranes, the colours, the tiny structures they might have seen hundreds of times without ever really noticing. I hope that curiosity could extend beyond food. We are surrounded by things we think we already know simply because they are familiar, but the closer we look, the more complex they become. If Slices of Life could leave someone with a little more wonder towards the ordinary, and a stronger desire to observe and question the world around them, that would be enough for me.