Sehnsucht: The invention of Nature

The lost son who finds his old mother; the man who returns to his beloved,
from whom he was torn away by a fierce destiny;
the birthplace that everyone carries inside. The wandering Ulysses
who returns to his island after wandering for years;
the return, the return, the great magic of the return".
- The Ignorance, Milan Kundera


In his novel,"The Ignorance", Milan Kundera opens with the concept of
Nostalgia and its various translations: (...)"Nostalgia is therefore the
suffering caused by the unfulfilled desire to return (...). The Germans
rarely use the word nostalgia in its Greek form and prefer to say
Sehnsucht: desire for what is absent."

Inspired by Humboldt's travels through Latin America, the following
painting series interweaves concepts such as exoticism and paradise
while exploring the idealization of the New World brought to Europe by
the school of the Traveling Painters in the 19th century.

Yet, they are the result of personal and collective experiences: a broken
home along with the grief caused by the impossibility of returning to
one's home land: "Heimweh".

The journey and its experience have been essential in my work. As an
expatriate in Germany, since 2014 is that I question the concept of
home, identity, beauty and the interpretation of one's own land.

Some of the following pieces have a contemplative character, others
invite the viewer to enter the unknown but all of them seek to serve as a
mirror where emotions are seen through landscapes of one's own world.