Empty Speech
Empty Speech is series of paintings that investigate gestural abstraction as a field of repetition, erasure, and formal play. Each canvas is built through exercises in color and gesture, with successive layers painted over one another until the image arrives at a compositional resolution—or reaches a point of exhaustion that can be called ideal. In this process, gestures are continually covered, overwritten, or effaced, but traces of their presence remain embedded in the surface.
These works capture something usually hidden or wiped away in my other projects: my hand, my signature. The rules are simple yet constraining: each canvas must conform to the same format, and each layer is laid down quickly, in one or two gestural strokes, using only a single color at a time. Over time, the surface becomes a palimpsest of erased gestures, each new layer both a covering and a preservation.
I describe these works as “empty speech,” borrowing the term from Jacques Lacan, who used it to describe the speech act of the ego-ideal. In a sense, all speech is empty speech: language as the medium through which we project fantasies of who we are, rather than who we might actually be. These paintings, then, are not expressions of emotion in the conventional sense but rehearsals of fantasy, articulations of the ego’s surface play.
By reframing gestural abstraction through Lacan, this series situates itself against the heroic narratives of Abstract Expressionism, where gesture was equated with authenticity and truth. Here, gesture is closer to rhetoric: formal, repetitive, emptied of direct content, yet nonetheless revealing in its insistence. It points less to expression than to performance, less to essence than to fantasy.