There is no sketch. No preparatory drawing. No plan transferred to surface.
The image exists first as a pressure — something that must be released. Becker begins anywhere: a corner, the center, the edge. The composition emerges from rhythm and gesture, not from design.
This is not improvisation. It is something closer to excavation — like Michelangelo's notion of freeing the figure already present in the marble. Except here, the figure is built rather than revealed, assembled fragment by fragment over months of concentrated labor.
​
​
​
Becker uses watercolor paper of a specific weight and texture — chosen after years of experimentation for its capacity to absorb pigment deeply, to hold color without losing luminosity.
Each sheet is painted by hand, often on both sides, in multiple layers. Some receive gold or silver leaf. The colors deepen with each application until they achieve a saturation that seems to glow from within.
The painted sheets are then cut into tesserae — small rectangles of approximately two centimeters — using a hand-operated guillotine. A single work may require tens of thousands of these fragments.
​​
On a prepared wooden panel, Becker embeds each tessera in a wet adhesive matrix — a technique that echoes the ancient method of fresco, where pigment bonds with wet plaster to become inseparable from its ground.
The placement follows no grid. Each fragment is positioned with tweezers, angled to catch light in a specific way, oriented to create movement across the surface. The work grows organically, section by section, sometimes over forty-eight hours of continuous labor.
After weeks of curing, the surface is shaped by hand — bent, curved, refined — then sealed with a thin layer of resin that preserves the texture without flattening it.
​
