Size: 80 × 80 cm

Technique: oil on canvas


Description:
“California” functions as a conceptual introduction to a broader body of work currently in development. The project investigates the iconography of the American West — figures such as the cowboy and cowgirl, musical elements, and the vast landscape as a symbolic space of projection — approaching the Western myth not as a geographic fact but as a cultural and imaginary construction.

The painting originates from a recent journey to the United States, yet it does not present a documentary California. Instead, it proposes a mental landscape: a constructed paradise shaped by collective imagery, cinema, visual culture, and long-held expectations. California here is less a physical location than a symbolic device, a space of desire filtered through subjective perception — almost a “rose-tinted gaze” in which reality and imagination overlap and blur.

At the core of the work lies the tension between ideal and reality. The American landscape operates as a promise of freedom, belonging, and new beginnings, while simultaneously revealing the fragility of such projections. This ambivalence is reflected in the pictorial language: the deliberately muted and at times somber palette replaces the stereotypical brightness of the Californian dream with subdued browns and greens, destabilizing familiar visual codes. Color does not confirm the expected image — it unsettles it.

The depicted figure holds a phone in their hands, as if compelled to verify the image, to confirm the visual promise. Glasses function as an additional filter, softening perception and prolonging the illusion. The work thus moves between construction and deconstruction — between recognizable iconography and the moment in which it begins to dissolve.

What emerges is not a place, but a layered inner landscape formed by cinematic memory and desire. The painting lingers in the instant when seeing turns into awareness — when the constructed paradise fractures and perception is forced to reorganize itself.

Far from operating as an explicit political statement, the work can be understood as a visual reflection on collective narratives, cultural mythologies, and personal memory. “California” inhabits the suspended space between desire and distance, between myth and disenchantment, questioning the very stability of the images that shape contemporary Western imagination.