In 1996, I started my portrait series. The landscapes in the backgrounds of the portraits are blurred; the poses of the people being portrayed refer to the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci, Titian and Piero della Francesca, and the postures of the heads and bodies as well as the positions of the hands remind us of historical paintings. Enhanced by undirected light, the people radiate a stillness that is almost meditative in its calmness.

The blurred landscapes or city views in the backgrounds are synonyms of an outside world but, although aesthetically related, they are far removed in time and space from the people being portrayed. The dissonance between the outer and the inner worlds shows the impossibility of final understanding. All matter moves at varying relative speeds and thus remains in a relationship marked by a blurred resolution.

The German theoretical physicist and one of the key pioneers of quantum mechanics Werner Karl Heisenberg developed the term "uncertainty principle" to describe the inability to determine a particle's speed and its location at the same time. "The more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa. We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself but nature exposed to our method of questioning," Heisenberg explained.

With this project I was trying to connect Renaissance — the cradle of humanism and modern sciences — and the quantum theory, the determining idea of the 20th century.