I was looking for a centerpiece for a room filled with pool-table imagery and the iconography of the 8-ball. I couldn’t find the piece I wanted, so I created it.
I called it: The Ball of Certainty.
What began as an answer to a decorating problem quickly became something else. The image had a story in it. Then another story appeared behind that one. The 8-ball could be a game, a prediction, a vice, a warning, a joke about fate or a reminder that sooner or later every one of us ends up facing an outcome we cannot negotiate with.
That was the beginning of Aetherion Gallery.
I have always been fascinated by the things humanity does not completely understand: ancient civilizations that appear more sophisticated than we expect them to be, mythology that may contain fragments of forgotten history, the origins of consciousness, the possibility of lost knowledge and the uncomfortable distance between what we know and what we merely assume to be true.
That curiosity found its way into the art.
Aetherion Gallery lives somewhere between the ancient and the futuristic, the beautiful and the unsettling, the sacred and the decadent. There is sensuality here, too, though it rarely announces itself politely. Desire, bodies, vice and innuendo slip into the work with a certain wink. Sometimes the joke is obvious. Sometimes you have to look twice. And sometimes, if you have to ask whether something was intentional, it probably was.
I am not particularly interested in making art that simply matches the sofa.
I want to make the piece people notice from across the room. The one someone walks toward. The one that starts a conversation and, occasionally, an argument.
Aetherion grew from one artwork into an ongoing search for something larger: for better questions, forgotten stories, hidden meanings and whatever truth may exist beneath the version of reality sitting comfortably on the surface.
