STRATES explores what, over time, accumulates between the self and itself.

The series is structured around two opposing gestures: covering and excavating.

In the paper works, light precedes matter. Torn fragments are layered over a ground of gold, gradually building the surface until what was present from the outset is almost entirely buried.

In stone, the process is reversed. Matter is no longer added, but removed. Excavation becomes an act of unveiling: moving through the material, layer after layer, until reaching a depth where gold begins to emerge.

Two inverse processes driven by the same inquiry.

One proceeds through accumulation, the other through excavation. Between them unfolds a reflection on interiority: what settles, what remains buried, and what we choose to move through in order to reach a deeper stratum of the self.

In STRATES, gold is not the outcome of transformation.

It precedes the gesture.

Light, therefore, is neither attained nor produced: it is revealed.

The series thus shifts the question of identity, away from what we become through accumulation, towards what might persist beneath the successive layers that constitute us.

STRATES inhabits this interval: between concealment and revelation, construction and excavation, surface and depth.

An uncertain threshold where removing matter no longer means destroying it, but making visible what was already there.