FH // WASP


The paintings combine the genre of Folk Horror with the Being-in-the-world of WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants).

Places hold a sedimented memory. Folk Horror portrays nature as a force that does not act in a benign manner unconditionally. WASPs cover tracts of land and their institutions with their mode of life. There, they collide with a plague that draws its efficacy from the soil and can be neither bought, tamed, nor overturned by old money. Horror is not elsewhere, arriving at some later point in time. It has always been there, it is the place itself.

The common society in Folk Horror is a close-knit collective marked by geographical and moral isolation that celebrates life and death through peculiar customs. Visiting strangers are either absorbed into the community or sacrificed.

Pagan harshness then encounters a demeanor shaped by Christian values: an entirely different tradition compels a dutiful, well-situated circle to act largely within the bounds of reason. The rituals and ceremonies of the WASPs serve their network and the accumulation of property and power more than they help manifest a specific notion of nature at all costs. Nature, to their exclusive milieu, is nothing more than a backdrop against which their own splendor unfolds.

At this point the paintings turn to influential figures as they appear nowadays: pale and unwholesome, both viciously intelligent and dull as hell, at once idolised, envied, and demonised.

Horror is not one-sided. It passes over to the other side, while both sides simultaneously resemble and oppose each other, and abundance and darkness come together.