To be Fully honest, I believe the debate over modernity is irrelevant for a painter. Painting aims at being timeless. For me Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earing”, while looking at me, does not belong to any specific time frame. She could be a girl I just came across on the underground. I like digging out those pieces of eternity from the history of art. As I said previously, painting is a language and each painter has his or her own language. In order to speak all of these languages, you have to tackle them to make them your own. The only way to do so is to copy them. I spent several months learning how to speak “Ingres”, Sargent” or “Vermeer”, Finding out how their color palette was organized, how they superimposed layers of paint, how they dealt with the position of thin and bold, black and white, opaque and transparent. In Venice, I remember the Pesaro Madonna by Titian and the eyes of that young character on the right in the foreground: he seems to be calling out to the spectator and I enjoy thinking he has been calling out to us for four centuries and time has no power on him whatsoever.