I’ve always been more interested in suggestion than exposure.
The artwork FETISH wasn’t born from a desire to depict the erotic body, but to question what makes something feel erotic in the first place. Where is the threshold between feeling and symbol, between body and gesture, between silence and intensity?
In FETISH, you won’t find nudity. You won’t find anything overtly sexual in the conventional sense — no skin, no curves, no gaze begging to be interpreted. And yet, it’s one of the most sensual works I’ve ever created.
Why?
Because eroticism is not necessarily about what you see — it’s about what’s implied, what’s restricted, what’s charged. And often, it’s about control. In FETISH, I worked through layers of metaphor — textures that bind, elements that restrain, shapes that repeat with a tension that feels almost ritualistic. The face is still, detached, but somewhere inside the structure of the work, you feel the pull. The restraint. The quiet demand to submit or resist.
I wanted to create a portrait that doesn’t seduce with the obvious — but with atmosphere.
The kind of piece that whispers, instead of screams.
The word “fetish” itself carries a complex history — from colonial exoticism to religious relics to modern kink culture. I’m not here to resolve that history. I’m interested in using the tension of the word. The way it hovers between reverence and taboo. Between object and obsession. Between the sacred and the charged.
There’s a recurring theme in my work: the absence of performance. The subject does not “present” for you. They do not smile. They do not explain. That’s especially true in FETISH. The expression is neutral, unreadable. And that neutrality becomes its own kind of eroticism — a refusal to give what is expected.
The tension lives in what’s not shown.
There’s no clear object of desire in the piece. No typical beauty cues. But there is texture. I painted materials that feel tight, suffocating, ornamental, even ceremonial. Things that cling — not like a lover, but like a ritual. The form of the artwork itself becomes a fetish — something held, revered, and never fully understood.
I think part of my refusal to depict explicit nudity in this piece came from a desire to reclaim the visual language of desire. To remind myself (and the viewer) that eroticism isn’t always about exposure. Sometimes it’s about privacy. About the charged silence between what’s shown and what’s withheld. About how suggestion moves more deeply than visibility.
I want my work to leave traces — not answers. To make people linger in that liminal space between attraction and analysis, desire and distance.
FETISH isn’t about sex. It’s about power, repetition, silence, and the strange ways we make meaning from metaphor. It's about how deeply suggestion can move us, and how powerful it is when the body isn’t exposed — but is everywhere, in texture, shape, and intention.
