Painting series · 2009–2010
Motorcycles
For me, the motorcycle was a familiar part of urban life—a means of working, getting around, and making a living that gradually took on an unsettling significance. In this series, I explore the distance between familiarity and fear: how something we pass every day can be both a sign of life and a presence that evokes threat.
I began this series shortly before 2009. In the streets, outside shops, and amid the city’s crowds, motorcycles were bound to the lives of people struggling to earn a living, often unseen. Yet in the social climate of those years, the same vehicle moving through a crowd could take on another meaning. This ambiguity mattered to me: the proximity between something that helps life move forward and something that can restrict the movement of others.
In these paintings, the motorcycle sometimes remains in its familiar surroundings; elsewhere, it appears alongside motifs, figures, and spaces that disrupt that familiarity. Repetition, accumulation, and shifts in context suspend the scene between everyday life, humour, and anxiety. I wanted this unease to emerge through the relationships between elements within the image, without turning everything into an explicit account of a particular event.
"Motorcycles" became a way for me to reflect on human presence through the objects that surround it. Even where no one is visible, traces of labour, exhaustion, power, and fear remain. The motorcycle has no fixed meaning in these images; each juxtaposition reveals another aspect of the relationship between people and the spaces they inhabit.
Red Circles, 2009
