Speculative Optics
The project began in 2004 as a formalist exercise in ordering chaos. My early works sought to impose Euclidean logic onto the urban environment: I consistently purged the human from the frame, transforming space into a sterile abstraction and a set of ideal planes. It was a dictatorship of composition over reality.
While visually referencing the New Topographics and the Düsseldorf School, my work rejects their detached, neutral stance. I refuse to view the urban environment as a passive backdrop, seeing it instead as an autonomous material field that is opaque, resistant, and indifferent.
This project explores the Unheimliche: moments when familiar objects appear alien, caught in a state not intended for our gaze. I avoid narrative and symbolism to focus on the raw autonomy of the material. What emerges is not a picturesque fragment, but the quiet hostility of matter. Space tolerates us while offering no meaning.
Today, I document the city as a zone of material resistance. The soothing formalism of my early years has given way to a sense of permeability and anxiety. I intentionally juxtapose the naive sterility of the archive with the toxic materiality of recent images. This series chronicles a failed attempt at control. I am interested in objects that remain hermetically sealed within themselves, inaccessible to understanding. It is a gaze upon the everyday from which the subject has been definitively removed.
«Someone terrible enters the sty.»
James Havoc, «Satanskin»
