The women Gauguin once painted are returning. Not as historical figures, but as fourth- and fifth-generation descendants. They appear in my dreams. There, they leave the paintings from which they came. They step out of Gauguin’s world and into my present. In my dreams, their bodies become translucent. One Polynesian woman transforms into another. Contours blur. Gestures repeat themselves across more than a century. Sometimes a descendant strikes the same pose as her great-grandmother in a painting—one by Gauguin. Yet a small movement is enough—a bent leg, a slight turn of the head—and suddenly the past breaks free from its origin and becomes the present. Gauguin’s paintings serve only as a starting point for me. They open a door. What emerges behind it takes on its own form.

Gauguin’s paintings serve as my starting point. They open a door. What emerges behind it takes on its own form. Photography becomes a place where memory and imagination meet.

While taking the photos, I speak softly to the models—almost in a whisper. The silence of the moment is part of the image. I move through my own dreams like a cautious observer, sometimes filled with fear of destroying this fragile atmosphere.

My goal is not to reconstruct the past. I seek a state in which reality and illusion are inextricably intertwined. The photographic image remains entirely real. The light, the body, the moment actually existed. Yet the content of the image belongs to another reality—that world between dream, memory, and longing. I am not photographing the descendants of Gauguin’s models. I am photographing the return of images. The people become bearers of a memory that continues across generations and finds a new form in their dreams.

After four years of research and photography in Polynesia, I am moving away from the documentary search for traces of Gauguin’s models. I am on my way toward a poetic visual world in which their descendants become bearers of memory, time, and transformation. There, something independent begins—something that, while originating with Gauguin, increasingly bears my own signature.