When I have never been but others 2023 – 136 x 190cm, oil on canvas
The flower, placed in sufficient context, carries the weight of the human without reducing it. This is a painterly argument against abstraction, in the political as much as the formal sense. To name the figure, refugee, citizen, witness, body in a zone, and then to displace that name onto a bloom that will survive or not survive according to conditions not of its choosing: this is not aestheticisation. It is, on the contrary, the most direct method available to a painter who refuses to render the human body legible in a world that has made its legibility dangerous.
The series will not resolve. It is not built for resolution. It is built, like the condition it describes, for continuation.