This painting presents identity as a site of rupture rather than unity: a face split by a jagged fault line that reads not as division but as an event—trauma, awakening, or the moment contradiction can no longer be contained. The cool, withdrawn blue and the inflamed, exposed red remain locked in tense coexistence, while ghostlike faces intrude across the surface, evoking internalized voices, social pressure, and the many selves that crowd consciousness. Deliberately rough mark-making and bleeding pigment refuse polish, insisting that damage not be concealed but allowed to become structural—both what threatens the figure and what holds it together. The work offers no resolution, only endurance: eyes remain open, the mouth still speaks, and survival is figured not as a return to wholeness but as the ongoing negotiation of irreconcilable forces held together by fracture.
It doesn’t name the wound.
It names the way one must stand before it.