CRYSTAL-IMAGE
The concept of the virtual is understood not as the unreal but as a mode of existence that is fully real without being actualized. The images oscillate between image perception, image dream, and image world. They are constructed as virtual images, situated between what is seen, what is remembered, and what is imagined, resisting any stable or definitive reading. In this sense, I relate my work to Deleuze’s notion of the crystal image, where the actual and the virtual coexist within the same visual field. The painted image becomes a pure recollection, not tied to a specific past event but existing as a condensed mental image. In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Deleuze describes the crystal-image as a direct presentation of time itself: "What we see in the crystal is no longer the empirical progression of time as succession of presents, nor its indirect representation as interval or as whole; it is its direct presentation, its constitutive dividing in two into a present which is passing and a past which is preserved, the strict contemporaneity of the present with the past that it will be, of the past with the present that it has been. It is time itself which arises in the crystal [...] The direct time-image or the transcendental form of time is what we see in the crystal; and crystalline signs, should therefore be called mirrors or seeds of time."