“Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.”
— Salvador Dalí
Suspended Grace, Paris, France, 2010
I didn’t intend to cause a scene that afternoon in Paris. I only wanted to sit quietly by the Tuileries fountain, let the light do its usual Parisian magic, and watch life unfold with that slow, syrupy grace the city reserves for days when no one is in a hurry.
But then she appeared—my floating ballerina.
Not in the usual way performers arrive, with warm-up bags and a stretch routine, but suspended inside a glassy sphere, as if she’d been conjured by an overconfident street magician or borrowed straight from Melvin Sokolsky’s dreams. She hovered over the pond, glowing like a misplaced moon, dancing a slow pirouette while the rest of us pretended this was a perfectly normal thing to witness on an average Thursday.
What struck me most, however, wasn’t her elegance or the surreal spacecraft she traveled in; it was the people around me. Everyone carried on as though Paris often delivered women in bubbles, freshly ironed tutus and all, via crane from the sky. A man to my left sipped his coffee. A woman next to him lit a cigarette. Someone else scrolled on their phone. Civilization endured.
Yet there she was: a bubble-bound apparition spinning gently over the water, reminding me that the absurd and the sublime are often separated only by the thickness of a soap film.
As she floated, the soft dusk settled over the Louvre’s silhouette, mottling the sky with that smoky, painterly texture I always feel rather than see. The whole scene unfurled like a memory that wasn’t mine, dreamlike, unfinished, slightly unhinged, and entirely marvelous.
These are the images I chase. Or perhaps the images chase me. They materialize in fragments: a ballerina, a crane cable, a historical skyline, and a vague suspicion that something impossible is about to happen. My job is simply to assemble the pieces into a world where the improbable feels not only plausible, but inevitable.
Because I’ve always believed that art isn’t simply about depicting what I’ve seen. It’s about revealing what insists on existing, those interior visions that refuse to stay politely in the mind. And so I stitch the real with the unreal, the whimsical with the melancholic, hoping that if I leave the seams visible, viewers will step inside and find their own version of the story.
As for the ballerina, she eventually drifted toward the far end of the pond, disappeared from my line of sight, and, if I’m being honest, I’m not entirely sure she ever landed. Paris is tricky that way. It hides its magic in plain sight and lets you decide whether you want to believe it.
I always do.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work emerges from the friction between memory, imagination, and a desire to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. I build cinematic scenes from multiple images, textures, and fleeting visual impressions, those half-formed ideas that appear like ghosts at the edge of consciousness. I invite viewers into worlds where the boundaries between reality and the surreal blur, but the emotional truth remains clear. Art, for me, is as essential as breath, a necessary way to reclaim wonder and share the quiet but persistent stories that shape my inner world.