Extraction head IV 2026 – 40 x 35cm, acrylic, charcoal, pencil on canvas
This painting pushes even further into dissolution, the figure is barely holding together, almost completely consumed by the dark field. A neon green frame hovers around the head, but now it’s breaking apart, fragmenting, like a surveillance monitoring system glitching or is the head degrading beyond the capacity of the apparatus to track coherently?
The face in the center is ghostly, spectral, you can just make out the suggestion of features, but they’re disintegrating into the surrounding black and grey. There’s a purple passage across what might be the lower face or neck, an unexpected color that reads as bruising or perhaps the color of hypoxia, tissue starved of oxygen, systems shutting down, another form of toxic intrusion. The yellow passages in the corners (upper left, lower right) create an unsettling illumination, like the figure is being lit from multiple artificial sources simultaneously, interrogation lighting, screen glow, the multi-directional exposure of being monitored from every angle.
The green inset frame itself seems to be corroding or melting. In “Extraction Head II” it was more intact, more contained and aggressive. Here it’s fragmenting, running, losing its hold on the image, disintegration rather than resistance?
The impasto is incredibly dense and worked, you can see the accumulated labor, the scraping, the rebuilding. Those thick black passages in the lower portion feel almost like tar or sediment, as if the figure is being buried or is sinking into data sludge, the accumulated weight of all that monitoring and extraction. The struggle is still visible in every ridge and scrape. Nothing has been smoothed over. Nothing has been allowed to resolve.