The Threshold (Limen)

The Central Inquiry 

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I have never been good at staying in one place. I was born in Cameroon to Greek parents and have worked across several geographies since. Movement was never a strategy. It was simply the condition of my life. Over time I noticed that this condition quietly shaped the way I look at the world.
 

What interests me most are boundaries.

The moment where one state becomes another.
Where the visible dissolves into the invisible.
Where the sacred collides with the profane.
Where the intimate suddenly becomes public.
 

Anthropologists use the word Liminality for these transitional states. I prefer a simpler image: a threshold.
 

My paintings linger there.
 

A threshold is not a destination. It is a moment of suspension, a place where meaning has not yet decided what it wants to become. That ambiguity is where the most interesting things tend to happen.
 

In a culture that moves quickly and consumes images even faster, I opt for a slower practice and conceptual depth. Each painting is built through long sessions, allowing time, doubt, and small accidents to shape the final image. I am less interested in producing answers than in capturing a moment before an answer settles into place.

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The Chapters: Coordinates on the Same Map

To navigate this territory, I organize my work into several series. They are not separate themes so much as different vantage points on the same question.
 

• Beyond & Dominium examine the threshold between belief and authority. Ancient mythologies, religious imagery, and contemporary power structures appear side by side. The result is sometimes solemn, sometimes quietly ironic. Faith and power have always been close neighbors.
   

• Humanitas & Intima turn inward. These works explore the fragile border between private identity and the gaze of others. Portraits are spaces where personal memory, collective history, and the viewer’s own projections intersect.
   

• Libera occupies a different corner of the studio. Here the figure occasionally disappears and the rules loosen. Collage, abstraction, and material experimentation take the lead. If the other series are structured investigations, Libera functions more like a laboratory, where accidents are welcome and certainty is treated with mild suspicion.
   

Methodology: The "Phygital" Bridge

My process reflects the same fascination with thresholds.

Most paintings begin digitally. I construct compositions through collage and visual experimentation using contemporary tools (a legacy of my two decades working in graphic arts). This preparatory stage allows ideas to collide quickly, often generating images that would be difficult to invent directly on canvas.

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From there the work returns to something much older as the final painting is executed in oil using the à la prima method: fresh paint applied over fresh paint in sustained sessions. The process is immediate and physical. If the work demands it, the brushstrokes remain visible.

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In this sense the work exists between two worlds: a digital architecture translated into a handmade object. The result is an image that carries both precision and imperfection, something increasingly rare in an age of frictionless images.

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The Flow

I have never been particularly loyal to artistic dogma. For me, art isn’t frozen in time, trends, or predetermined boxes.
 

Styles change. Interests shift. One series may lead somewhere unexpected and another may quietly dissolve after a few years. I have learned not to resist these movements too much.
 

Art becomes sterile when it follows a predetermined route.
 

So I follow my own current rather than the prevailing one. This occasionally leads to contradictions, but contradictions are not necessarily a problem. They are often a sign that the work is still alive.
 

And, if nothing else, they keep the studio interesting.

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A glimpse at my Process

We are all walking contradictions. In God and Evil Staring at Each Other, I staged a cosmic battle using a mirror, a folding chair, and a local house painter who kindly stepped off his ladder to pose for me. It was a bit of an odd request, but he became the perfect subject for this internal tug-of-war. The blue and orange fields represent the 'Good' and 'Evil' sides of our nature, meeting at a sharp, inescapable line. It took many photos and a fair amount of 'digital gymnastics' in Photoshop to get the reflection and composition just right, before the first brushstroke on the canvas could even start.  
 

The finished work later appeared at the London Art Biennale 2021, making a journey from a precarious studio setup to a gallery wall. A small reminder that thresholds are not only philosophical ideas, they are also practical moments where something quietly crosses from one state into another.
 

And that crossing is where the story usually begins.