Figure: On Presence

Introduction

A figure appears again and again.

It stands in yellow fields beneath storm-dark skies, moves through forests where trees twist like flames, occupies stages framed by heavy curtains, or faces monolithic forms that dwarf its small body. Sometimes it is painted in warm flesh tones, sometimes in spectral white, sometimes in saturated red that vibrates against the surrounding world. Its features are never resolved. Its body is often naked, indeterminate, or subtly dysmorphic, exposed but not fully available. Its posture shifts only slightly: weight held, arms loose at its sides, occasionally holding something.

It stands. It does not gesture dramatically, does not collapse, does not triumph.

This is not a claim about resilience. The figure is not enduring toward anything, and its persistence is not being offered as a quiet kind of victory. A figure that simply remains can slide easily into consolation, into the comfortable, marketable mood that resilience has become. What follows tries to hold the figure's presence and that risk in the same hand, rather than letting one resolve into the other.

The Figure

The figure is always solitary. There is no crowd, no social scene, no narrative interaction to stabilise meaning. Each body appears alone within an environment, yet never separate from the forces around it. The surrounding ground presses, holds, frames, or obscures the figure, shaping how it appears and how it can be read.

The figures have no faces. Some are too small for features; in others, the face is simply not attempted. This absence is not a lack of completion, and it does not point toward a hidden interior waiting to be read elsewhere. Where the self-portraits return to the face as a contested site of recognition, these paintings shift the question to the body in space. What matters is the body, the posture, the weight, the colour, the fact of standing. A face would pull attention toward identity, expression, psychology. These paintings ask something simpler and more difficult: someone is here.

This distinguishes the work from the confessional, autobiographical figure that has anchored much recent painting, where an absent or obscured face still gestures toward a specific, recoverable self behind it. It also distinguishes it from meme-adjacent figuration, where a blank or generic face becomes a surface for the viewer's own projection. This figure offers neither. It resists fixed narrative, stable identity, or easy psychological reading, and does not resolve into a conventional nude, portrait, or symbolic type.

The paintings remain invested in the pleasures of paint: colour, atmosphere, surface, touch, and the long tradition of the figure placed within a world. That inheritance is held in check rather than indulged. What first appears visually inviting begins to register as unstable, interrupted by awkwardness and distortion that do not resolve into a more sophisticated form of beauty later. The disruption simply sits there, alongside the parts that are still, in a plain sense, good to look at.

Surfaces shift across the body of work, from thin, stained passages where the canvas weave still shows through, to areas of denser, worked impasto where the figure has been built up and scraped back. The works do not subscribe to a single recognisable language of painting; they are coherent through recurrence rather than stylistic uniformity. Each figure returns, but each return is materially different, unsettling the expectation that a body of work should resolve into a signature style.

On Uncertain Ground

These paintings are sometimes read against the iconography of twentieth-century existentialism, the isolated figure screaming into the void, crushed by meaninglessness. That comparison is useful mainly for what it rules out. There is no scream here, no anguish staged for legibility, no crisis given a recognisable emotional shape.

But the alternative is not stoic calm, and it is not simply the now-familiar vocabulary of precarity either, even though that word sits close to the right register. Precarity has become a fluent aesthetic: economic and ecological instability rendered as a mood that contemporary culture knows how to produce, circulate, and feel mildly affirmed by. Endurance gets photographed well. Resilience has a market. A painting of a figure standing in difficulty risks doing exactly this work, supplying the consoling image precarity-talk has learned to expect from itself.

This figure tries to give that expectation as little as possible to hold onto. It does not overcome its circumstances, does not master them, and does not preserve itself for some future use. There is no implied reward for the standing, no sense that staying intact is banking something to be spent well later. This is a claim about what the figure carries, not about why the paintings are made. The work of making them may have its own purpose, its own use to the person making it. But within the image itself, the figure remains present because that is what is happening in the painting, not because presence is being proposed as a strategy, a virtue, or a quiet form of victory.

Past the Epochs

It is tempting to locate this figure somewhere on a map of inherited positions: pre-modern wholeness, modern anguish, postmodern irony, metamodern oscillation between sincerity and doubt. Each offers a way of explaining what the figure is doing by way of what it is doing it instead of.

But this figure does not oscillate. Oscillation is still a position, just a moving one, and metamodernism's back-and-forth between hope and irony has by now become as available and as legible as the postures it was meant to complicate. To swing between sincerity and doubt knowingly is still to have a strategy. This figure has none.

It is harder, and less satisfying, to say only that the figure has not arrived at a position rather than that it occupies a new one. Not undecided as a stance held deliberately open, which is its own kind of performance, but undecided in the plainer sense of not yet, or not at all, resolving into something that could be named and therefore reproduced.

This matters because every position, once named, becomes available to be taken up, marketed, repeated. Sincerity becomes a tone. Irony becomes a tone. Their combination becomes a tone. What has not yet been articulated cannot yet be sold back. The figure's refusal to resolve is not a delay before some future clarity. It may be the only way of remaining, however briefly, outside the cycle by which a position becomes a product.

Whether this can be sustained, whether indeterminacy itself eventually hardens into a recognisable gesture, is not a question the painting can answer. It can only keep declining to answer the other question first.

Inherited Ground

The environments in these paintings carry their own histories. Many began as earlier paintings, canvases that already existed with their own marks, failures, and unresolved passages, some still visible beneath or beside the figure. The figure enters them later, and what happens at that meeting is not decided in advance.

This is closer to a pairing than an inheritance. The old canvas has its own properties: a colour logic, a set of marks, a residue of whatever it was trying to be before it was set aside. The figure has its own properties too. Bringing the two together is not a matter of the figure overcoming the canvas, or the canvas simply hosting the figure. It is closer to placing two substances in contact to see what happens between them. Sometimes the result reads as tension, the figure visibly at odds with a ground that will not quite accommodate it. Sometimes it reads as harmony, an unlikely fit that feels, briefly, inevitable. Sometimes it is neither, a third thing with no settled name, a feeling the painting produces without supplying the word for it.

None of these outcomes is sought in advance. The old canvas is not chosen because it will obviously suit the figure, and the figure is not adjusted afterward to better suit the canvas. The image that results is allowed to be what it is, including when what it is cannot be quickly named as harmonious or difficult, restful or precarious. This unnamed register may be the more interesting one. Tension and harmony are both legible feelings, available words for what a viewer is looking at. The paintings are also, sometimes, after something that does not yet have a word, a feeling produced specifically by this combination of this body and this ground, that would not arise from either alone.

There is a broader condition in this too. We also arrive into circumstances we did not make, and do not get to remake from nothing, and what results from that meeting is similarly not known in advance, not simply difficult, not simply survivable, but sometimes a feeling that has no ready name. The question is not whether we begin from a blank canvas. We do not. The question is closer to what happens at the meeting, and whether that can be looked at honestly rather than resolved too quickly into either complaint or comfort.

The environment, in any case, operates as pressure rather than backdrop, an atmosphere that presses upon, holds, obscures, or frames the body. In some works the figure appears to emerge from the painted field; in others it seems partially absorbed by it, edges blurring, proportions shifting, the body misaligned in ways that register less as expressive distortion than as a plain record of what this particular meeting produced.

The Studio

It is tempting to picture the studio as a room of withdrawal, a single mind sitting with a single canvas, working something out in private before it is shown to anyone. Some of that is true here. There is solitude in it, and long stretches where nothing happens except looking.

But the studio is also a workshop, in the older sense of that word. Canvases accumulate against the walls in different states of finish. The same figure is brought out and set against a new ground, not because the last attempt failed but because the next one has not been tried yet. There is something closer here to a small factory than a chapel, production sitting alongside reflection, repetition alongside attention, the quiet of contemplation in the same room as the activity of actually making things, one after another, to see what they do.

This is not a contradiction so much as two speeds of the same practice, and production is where they meet. The making is not what happens after the looking is finished, and the looking does not pause while the making takes place. Production is the site where contemplation and experimentation actually occur together, not before or after each other but as the same act. This is part of why there are so many of these paintings. The number is not incidental or a by-product of an idea repeated for its own sake. Producing many works, steadily, is how the looking gets done at all. A canvas is pulled out, a figure placed within it, the result looked at for a long time, sometimes set aside unresolved, sometimes returned to weeks later against a different ground entirely. The studio holds both the stillness the paintings depict and the activity that produces them, without much separation between the two.

This matters for how the stillness in the paintings should be read. It is not a record of the artist's own withdrawal from the world, a private calm rendered onto canvas. It is closer to the residue of a busier, more experimental process, carried out in a room where solitary looking and repeated production are simply the same daily practice, not two states to choose between.

Still, Another One

The figure repeats across fields, forests, storms, stages, cliff edges, skies, thresholds, abstract grounds. This is not insistence in the sense of repeating a single claim until it is believed. It is closer to a working method: the figure held roughly constant, while the ground, the light, the weather, the scale of threat, the title, change from one canvas to the next. Each painting is another instance of the same wondering: what does presence feel like here, under these conditions, met with this particular ground.

This is part of why the figure resists settling into a position. A position implies a fixed relation to the world that could, in principle, be stated once and then defended. What is happening across these paintings is closer to a sequence of encounters, the same uncertain body placed against different conditions to see what the resulting image feels like, where it settles into ease, where it does not, what changes when the storm becomes a forest, or the forest becomes a stage. No single encounter is more correct than another. The point is not to arrive at the right conditions for the figure, but to keep meeting it under new ones.

The titles, Ready, Searching, Storm, Orange Sky, Moon, Into the Woods, Is Coming, What Else, Green Shoes Animal Head, Abstract, function less as explanations than as markers of each encounter: a weather, a threshold, a question, a state not yet arrived at. None of them imply that arrival is coming. Together they read less like a story than like a record kept of separate visits.

"Still standing" is the phrase this body of work keeps circling without quite endorsing. It is not victory, and the paintings try not to let it quietly become one through repetition. To stand still, here, is not to keep something open for later, and it is not the accumulation of evidence toward a conclusion about endurance. It is the present tense of each separate encounter, with no claim made about what the series as a whole adds up to, because it is not clear that it adds up to anything beyond the next meeting, and the next.

Domestic Scale

These paintings are small, closer to something that might hang in a hallway or above a desk than to anything built for a public wall. This is partly a refusal of history painting's monumental register, which addresses a public and asks to be read as a declaration. A monumental figure still standing becomes very easily a monument to resilience, ready-made for an inspirational caption.

The smallness here should not be mistaken for intimacy or warmth, exactly. A small painting in a hallway is also a painting that is easy to walk past, easy to stop noticing, easy to live alongside without much thought. That is closer to the truth of how precarity is actually lived: not as a held, attended-to companionship with difficulty, but as something low-grade and constant, absorbed into the texture of a room and largely unremarked. The scale of these paintings is less an invitation to closeness than an admission of how little weight the work can reasonably claim. It does not ask to matter more than a hallway painting matters.

Holding Open

The faceless figure is not the heroic individual of modernity facing the void, not the optimised self of platform life converting its time into value, and not the resilience-image culture already knows how to produce on demand. Nor is it simply the absence of all of these, an empty or ironic gesture standing in the space where a fuller subject used to be. The figure is not a critique performed through blankness. It is a painted body, in a painted place, doing the one thing a painted body can do without further claim: occupy the surface.

The storms gather or clear, the trees press in or stand apart, the stage waits, and the figure does not narrate any of this as survival, hardship overcome, or a position to be admired. It does not ask to be read as brave.

What the paintings offer is not a statement about presence but presence as a fact of the paint itself, repeated across many separate canvases without building into an argument for its own value. Within the image, there is no implied reward for the attention paid here, no larger meaning the standing is secretly accruing toward. The practice that produces the paintings may have its own reasons, its own steady use. The figure inside each one does not carry any of that. It only stands.

The figure is here. The paint is here. The rest is still open.