Why Black & White

My work is, above all, a performance. It takes an immense amount of time, energy, and precision to bring one image into existence, and yet the final result is intentionally minimalist. I want the viewer to never feel the complexity behind it.

That is the first reason I work exclusively in black and white.

If I used color, people would immediately understand that the images are made underwater. And once they know that, they start focusing on the performance itself, the technical feat, rather than on the message the piece is trying to convey. That is not what I want them to see first.

I want them to see and feel the story before they see the water.

There is a second reason, less strategic and more sensory. Black and white enhances the sculptural quality of the body and the composition. Stripped of color, a body suspended in water stops looking like a photograph of someone swimming. It starts looking like something carved, something that could belong to another century entirely, closer to marble than to skin.

This is not a coincidence. My aesthetic is deeply rooted in the past, in Ancient Greece, the Italian Renaissance, and the Baroque, especially in painters like Caravaggio. What draws me to that period is not nostalgia. It is the original idea of art: what art meant on a spiritual and emotional level, before it became something to consume quickly and forget.

In classical art, the human body was never just a body. It was a vessel for something larger. Removing color from my images is my way of removing distraction, so that what remains is closer to that original intention: presence, gravity, and the quiet dignity of a form held in stillness.

Black and white does not simplify my work. It reveals it.