Figure: On Presence

The Figure

There is a figure that appears again and again. It stands in yellow fields beneath storm-blackened skies, walks through forests where the trees twist like flames, occupies stages framed by heavy curtains, faces monolithic forms that dwarf its small body. Sometimes the figure is rendered in warm flesh tones, sometimes in spectral white, sometimes in a red so saturated it seems to vibrate against whatever surrounds it. Its features are never resolved. Its posture shifts only slightly—weight distributed, arms loose at its sides, occasionally holding something. It does not gesture dramatically. It does not collapse. It does not triumph.

It stands—and in standing, remains capable of everything that standing makes possible.

The figures have no faces. Some are too small for features; in others the face is simply not attempted. The face is not where the work lives. What matters is the body, the posture, the weight, the colour, the fact of standing. A face would pull attention toward identity, expression, psychology. The paintings ask something simpler: someone is here. Someone stands.

The viewer cannot meet the figure's gaze, cannot read an expression. But the figure is undeniably present—and perhaps, without a face to specify it, the figure becomes easier to stand with. Not a someone to observe, but a presence to share.

On Uncertain Ground

These paintings resist the gravitational pull of twentieth-century existentialism, that familiar iconography of alienated figures screaming into voids or crushed beneath the weight of meaninglessness. The figure here is not Giacometti's attenuated walker, worn thin by being. It is not Bacon's screaming pope, caught in a cage of its own dissolution. Something else is happening—something that feels specific to now, to the particular texture of contemporary endurance.

That texture has a name, or several names: precarity, instability, the erosion of grounds once assumed solid. The contemporary condition is not characterized by a single catastrophe but by the sustained absence of security—economic, ecological, institutional, existential. The floor might hold or it might not. The job might last or it might not. The climate might remain livable or it might not. This is not apocalypse. It is something harder to represent: the ongoing state of not knowing whether the ground will hold.

The figure in these paintings stands on such ground. And yet it does not fall, does not flee, does not freeze in terror. It stands. This standing—undramatic, persistent, neither heroic nor defeated—is the work's central proposition. Not that we can overcome precarity, master it, resolve it into stability. But that we can remain present within it. That presence itself, the simple fact of continuing to stand, constitutes a kind of action—and more than that, maintains the possibility for action.

This is a reframing of agency itself. The dominant model of agency under contemporary conditions is neoliberal: agency as constant activity, as optimization, as the relentless production of measurable outcomes. The figure that merely stands would appear, from this perspective, to lack agency altogether—passive, inert, failing to capitalize on its potential.

But the paintings propose something different. Agency here is not the execution of action but the preservation of capacity. The figure does not spend itself in constant motion; it keeps itself intact, present, capable. This is agency as potentiality rather than performance—the quiet work of remaining in a position from which one could still move, still choose, still respond.

Inherited Ground

The environments in these paintings carry their own histories. They are not invented backdrops, conjured to serve the figure's narrative. They are older works—painted canvases that existed before the figure arrived, that had their own lives as paintings before being repurposed, painted into, transformed into grounds for standing.

The figure does not get to choose its conditions. It arrives into a world already made, already marked, already carrying the traces of what came before. This resonates with the texture of contemporary existence. We do not choose the conditions into which we are born, the economies we inherit, the ecological damage already done, the systems already in motion. We arrive into situations shaped by decisions made before us, by histories we did not author. The question is not whether to accept these conditions—they are already there, already painted—but how to stand within them, how to remain present in circumstances we did not make.

There is a temporal complexity here. Each painting holds at least two times: the time of the earlier painting, and the time of the figure's arrival. The figure stands in a present that is layered onto a past. It does not erase what came before; it coexists with it. The dialogue between times creates a kind of conversation within each work. They are not seamless; they are layered. The viewer can sense that the figure is an intervention into something that existed before.

Still, Another One

The figure appears again and again: in forests, in storms, on stages, at cliff edges, in tangles of colour. What does it mean to paint the same figure repeatedly, in different colours, in different contexts, always standing? The gesture begins to feel less like a motif and more like an assertion. There is something here that does not leave.

Each painting offers a new arrival. The figure enters another inherited environment, another already-painted world, and finds a way to stand within it. The repetition is not monotony but practice—the ongoing practice of arrival, of entering conditions not of one's making and remaining present anyway.

Still standing. The phrase carries weight in precarious times. It is what we say after the crisis has passed, or while the crisis continues, or when we recognize that crisis has become the ongoing condition rather than the exception. Still standing is not victory; it is continuation. It claims only to remain—and in remaining, to keep open whatever might come next.

Domestic Scale

These paintings are small. They tend toward domestic scale—the size of something you might hang in a hallway, above a desk, in a bedroom where you sleep and wake and sleep again. This is not incidental.

The history of figure painting includes a long tradition of the monumental: the grand history painting, the heroic scale that demands institutional walls. Those paintings address publics. They make declarations. They require distance.

These figures ask for something different. Their scale invites proximity. The encounter is intimate rather than declamatory. The figure does not address a crowd. It accompanies a person.

A monumental figure still standing becomes a monument to resilience—heroic, inspirational, available for institutional capture. A small figure still standing is something else. It is a companion. It is something you live with, pass by daily, glance at while making coffee or lying in bed unable to sleep. Its persistence becomes woven into the texture of ordinary life rather than elevated above it.

Precarity is lived domestically. It is felt in the rooms where rent is calculated, where the news plays in the background, where sleep comes or does not come. The paintings scaled for these rooms do not offer escape from precarity; they offer companionship within it.

To hang one of these paintings in a home is to install a quiet assertion of presence in the place where presence actually unfolds. The painting persists in the space where you persist. The figure becomes, in some small way, a companion in the project of continuing—and in that companionship, a reminder that continuing is not mere survival but the keeping-open of possibility.

Holding Open

The faceless figure, repeating across this body of work, proposes something about how we might exist now. Not the heroic individual of modernity, facing down the void with tragic courage. Not the fragmented subject of postmodernity, dissolved into signs and surfaces. Not the optimized self of neoliberalism, hustling and performing and converting every moment into value. Something else: a figure that remains embodied, present, chromatic, upright—but that withholds the face, that refuses the full conscription of identity into image.

The figure arrives into conditions it did not make. It inherits environments already painted, already weighted with their own histories. It does not get to start fresh, does not demand blank canvas, does not pretend that the world begins with its appearance. It enters what exists and finds a way to stand within it.

The environments change. The storms gather or clear. The trees press in or stand apart. The stages wait empty. The ground remains uncertain. And through all of it, the figure continues: not performing survival, not narrating resilience, not collapsing into pathos. Just being there, in whatever conditions present themselves.

This is what the paintings offer. Not commentary on presence but presence itself, enacted in paint, repeated until repetition becomes its own meaning. The figure stands. Still. Always. Another one. Again. Here. And here, still standing, it holds open the space where something else might yet happen.

Agency, in the end, is this: not the power to control outcomes but the capacity to remain present to them. Not the mastery of circumstances but the maintenance of a self that can still respond to circumstances, still choose, still act when action becomes clear or necessary. The figure in these paintings holds this capacity. It does not display it, does not perform it, does not monetise or optimise it. It simply preserves it, by standing, by remaining, by being still there when the painting is seen again.

This is the agency available to us in precarious times—not grandiose, not heroic, not guaranteed to succeed. But real. Present. The figure does this. The paintings show this. And in showing it, they offer it—not as instruction, not as inspiration, but as recognition. You are still here too. Still standing. Still capable of whatever comes next.