ALIENATION AND THE FRAME

The Material Unconscious of Displacement

This extended series of self-portraits operates at the threshold where painting becomes a site of inquiry—less concerned with representation than with the conditions under which a person becomes visible, or refuses visibility altogether. Drawing from a practice spanning multiple years, the work engages self-portraiture not as a mirror but as a mechanism of estrangement. The painted surface becomes a site where displacement is made materially legible through its very resistance to coherence.

The self-portrait has long served as a vehicle for existential inquiry: Rembrandt's unflinching late self-studies charted the erosion of flesh and status; Van Gogh's turbulent surfaces externalised psychic fragmentation; Frida Kahlo transformed personal suffering into symbolic theatre; Francis Bacon's screaming portraits registered post-war trauma through violent distortion; Gerhard Richter's photo-paintings interrogated the instability of the photographic image. Yet each of these practices, however radical in its moment, ultimately delivers a self to the viewer—wounded, distorted, or mediated, but still offered up for recognition. This work departs from that tradition. It is not concerned with the anguish or authenticity of a singular self, but with the structural conditions that determine which selves become visible at all. The viewer is not invited to empathise with a presented subject or to access an artist's inner world, but to confront the apparatus of visibility itself—to sit with a presence that refuses to fully arrive.

The Refusal of the Face

The deliberate obscuring or fragmentation of the face throughout much of the series intervenes in the politics of recognition. The face is where identity is projected and extracted, where recognition is granted or withheld, where some are rendered fully human and others reduced to types, threats, or abstractions. The contemporary subject exists at the pressure point of this system: perpetually subjected to identificatory technologies—facial recognition software, biometric databases, social media profiles—while struggling to maintain something that exceeds these mechanisms of capture.

The paintings' strategic illegibility engages a tradition of portraiture that withholds rather than offers—from Marlene Dumas's liquefied physiognomies to Glenn Brown's vertiginous surfaces to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's fictional subjects who exist outside documentary claims. Yet this work acknowledges that illegibility carries different weight depending on one's position within structures of power. For some, to be unseen is a luxury; for others, it is a condition imposed by violence or bureaucratic erasure. The obscured face here insists on the right to remain opaque—not as withdrawal, but as a refusal to submit to the demand that certain bodies make themselves endlessly available for scrutiny.

The work does not romanticise this refusal. Opacity operates differently depending on context: for some it represents freedom, for others vulnerability. The paintings hold this tension without resolving it, creating a space where illegibility can be claimed rather than imposed, where fragmentation signifies complexity rather than failure.

Painting Against the Regime of Images

The decision to work in painting—a medium often declared obsolete—acquires significance within this framework. Against the instantaneity of the selfie, the algorithmic optimisation of social media self-presentation, and the endless circulation of degraded digital images, painting insists on duration, materiality, and the irreducibility of the hand. The works' processes of accretion and erasure align with the recognition, evident in artists from Katharina Grosse to Tomma Abts to Amy Sillman, that painting's materials think alongside the artist.

This becomes particularly resonant in the context of displacement. Contemporary life demands documentary coherence—the constant production of evidence, the performance of consistent identity across platforms and borders. Painting offers a space where meaning emerges through ambiguity rather than clarity. The accumulation of these works—some over years of revisitation—refuses the demand for narrative closure, keeping the question open.

The Time of Arrival

The temporality of the series is not uniform. Some works arrive in a single sitting—urgent, immediate, the self caught rather than constructed. Others accumulate over months or years, revisited and reworked until something provisionally settles. The ground varies too: some paintings begin on fresh canvas, while others are made over existing work—often abstract, occasionally figurative. In these cases, the self emerges onto a surface already marked by other concerns, other images. It does not arrive into neutral space but inhabits what was there before, coexisting with traces it partially obscures.

A number of works are painted over earlier self-portraits—the self reworked over a former version of itself. Here, the previous face persists beneath, not erased but partially or fully buried. The current image is shadowed by what it has covered, accumulating not just material but self-history.

Yet none of these states is final. No self-portrait is truly finished. Any work, regardless of how it began, remains open to return—a few marks with brush or spatula enough to shift what had seemed resolved. This is process rather than method—responsive, contingent, without formula. The paintings are not treated as precious objects to be protected from further intervention, but as ongoing situations that remain open to the demands of the work. The self is not a destination—displacement is not erasure. What persists beneath remains available.

Between Recognition and Refusal

The series' structure—most works obscuring the face while a smaller subset retains traces of recognisability—performs the double bind of recognition. To be recognised is to become legible within existing categories; yet without recognition, one cannot claim political or social existence. This bind operates with particular force for those at the margins: to be recognised may require submission to terms defined by others, yet without it, basic forms of acknowledgment become inaccessible.

The paintings navigate this through strategic indeterminacy. They neither fully embrace nor fully refuse representation, maintaining a fugitive presence within but not captured by dominant systems. This recalls artists working at the limits of visibility: Zdzisław Beksiński's faceless figures, Ana Mendieta's earth-body works that register presence through trace and absence, Lorna Simpson's fragmented portraits that refuse to deliver the coherent identity the viewer expects.

The Other-Self: Alienation as Internal Condition

The stranger is not elsewhere. For the displaced subject, otherness has migrated inward—a second self that shadows the first, produced by every gaze that asks what are you, every system that demands legibility before granting presence. This is not metaphor but lived structure: the self that persists in dream and gesture, and the self that appears in documents, in databases, in the assumptions of others. They do not coincide. The paintings hold this non-coincidence without attempting repair. The obscured face is not hiding a truer self beneath; it marks the place where a self was made foreign to itself. What remains visible is the gap itself—the space where recognition fails, where the alien and the intimate share the same body, unreconciled.

What Remains

The question of what remains of the self after the mirror positions the work within a broader inquiry into how subjects are formed through images that are never quite them. For those marked by dislocation, this gap acquires heightened dimensions: the self persists in memory and longing, yet may bear little relation to the categories one must inhabit to navigate institutional structures.

The paintings propose that this fracture is not failure but structure. Disorientation produces alternative ways of seeing. Dislocation becomes not the deficit but the frame—the condition from which perception occurs.

Towards a Fragmented Whole

In their accumulation over time, in their refusal of resolution, these works propose alienation not as lack but as a way of knowing. What emerges is a practice that holds the intimate and the systemic, the personal and the political, in a single gesture. The paintings offer no consolation, no restoration of wholeness. They propose fragmentation as a form of integrity—an existence that acknowledges its vulnerability while insisting on the right to remain partially unknown, to preserve some corner of the self that cannot be captured, catalogued, or controlled.

This is painting that refuses to be merely seen, that insists on the political dimensions of aesthetic decisions without collapsing into illustration. It understands that in an age of compulsory visibility, obscurity might constitute not evasion but attention—a way of staying with the complexity of displacement, holding alienation and presence in the same frame.