philia ;

“When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place — a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow of Nature.”

“I like regarding myself as a virus that can undermine fixed languages such as Flemish painting, Baroque painting and Neoclassical painting that are steadily established in our imagination. Such witnesses are particularly suitable, even if they’re not the only ones, to reveal painting as a living language, never a slave to current affairs. My practices then unavoidably bring forms to the present. What happens to my paintings could not happen to ancient paintings or it would have made no sense at all” 

Vlaho Bukovac