Abstract nominee

The easygoing lifestyle of the West Coast made popular by the Beach Boys in the early 1960s expanded into the Californian Myth: people far away from the actual state longing for an idyllic world of leisure, bright light and utopian spaces where it seems to be afternoon forever, where everybody is beautiful and nobody needs to work. In this work I explore the dream of this iconic lifestyle, inspired by David Hockney and the visual aesthetics of the developing surf culture in the 1970s.

My images deviate from traditional photography and the tendency to generate an exact reproduction of the physical world. I aim to capture the essence of a scene, be it a location or an activity. I simply use the camera as an optical instrument with which to create abstract expressions of what I feel is present. Though remaining recognizable, the subjects are not represented exactly as they appear to the human eye. By submitting them to abstraction using a manual process, I intend to encapsulate an intrinsic quality. In effect, the images are perceived in a more intuitive way.