Extraction head I 2025 – 40 x 30cm, acrylic, pencil on canvas
“Extraction Head I” has crossed a threshold. The face is no longer being unmade; it has already been unmade and is now trying, with whatever is left, to stare back. The eyes feel accusatory in the most direct way. They are not pleading; they are registering the fact that the viewer is still standing there, intact, looking. The paint handling is brutal and tender at the same time.
The forehead is a thick, almost geological crust, as though the skull itself has been replaced by impacted ash and tar. The mouth is a wound that keeps reopening; every ridge of white and gray appears like scar tissue that never quite closed. The drips running down from the hairline read like tears, sweat, or slow bleeding (impossible to tell which, and that uncertainty is part of the abject horror).
Much raw canvas is left exposed, especially around the lower face and neck. The paint literally thins out to nothing, as if the subject is running out of material substance. That fraying, abraded edge where pigment gives up and the canvas shows through feels like the final stage of extraction: there is simply nothing left to take.
The head flickers in and out of legibility the longer you stand in front of it. It refuses the mercy of becoming pure abstraction or pure illustration. It stays in the unbearable middle zone: a portrait of someone who is no longer fully there but will not stop looking.
This is the point where the political charge and the existential charge finally fuse completely. It is the residue of a consciousness that has metabolized capitalisms war on us. The voice is silent, but the canvas is screaming.