Mirrors of the City

Within the exhibition’s curatorial framework, my contribution continues an ongoing exploration of self-portraiture as a space where personal experience can expand beyond the biographical. The figure shifts from an image of the self into a carrier of inner states, tensions and processes through which the personal can open toward something more universal.

The new works continue a line developed in What Warms, What Burns, where warmth, sunlight and fire appeared as recurring visual and emotional motifs. Here, fire becomes more internalized. I approach it as something that exists within us: a driving force, a source of attraction and energy, but also a force capable of becoming threatening or overwhelming. It can sustain, transform and reshape. As one of the most elemental forces, fire carries within it both danger and the possibility of change, creation and progress.

This tension is reflected in the titles of the works themselves: Made of Fire, My Fire Holds Me Up and I Stay True to the Fire. Together, they shift the image of fire from something observed from the outside toward something embodied. The self-portrait becomes a place where the figure does not merely confront the fire, but carries it, depends on it and, ultimately, becomes inseparable from it.