Fear not, I have ceased to sing 2023 – 200 x 160cm, oil and acrylic on canvas
Fear Not, I Have Ceased to Sing (2023) is the most explicit statement of the revision of the vanitas genre of still-life. The flowers here are disarticulated, stems without soil, petals without context, blooms hovering against black planes and geometric cuts of white and green. The title is a valediction that is also a threat, or a resignation that contains its own irony. The singing has not been silenced by death; it has ceased because continued song would be a form of complicity. The flowers have gone quiet. They are not at peace.
The geometric interruptions in this work, the white triangle that cuts the black field, the green shape below it, enforce a pictorial language that refuses the sensuousness the subject seems to offer. These are not backgrounds; they are structures. They organise the flowers’ apparent freedom into something more like managed dispersal: controlled, geometric, administered. The comparison to the spatial logic of the free zone is not metaphorical but structural. The flowers occupy whatever gaps the geometry permits.