VISAGE:

  Following the recent violence in Minnesota (beginning of 2026) executed by US government immigration agents, i’ve been called to action. My new work explores identity and judgement. i have created expressive faces over my artistic career, to reflect emotion, feelings, and expressions. Yet now, i’m exploring how identity may be shaped by circumstance, pressure, proximity, and ideology. i paint symbolic expressive faces, that i call the Visage: series. They function as sites of presence rather than portraiture. These works suggest masks not as concealment, but as revelation – forms through which emotion, character, and lived experience emerge through line, color, texture, rhythm, and flow. Each face becomes a threshold between inner life and public perception, holding ambiguity as an essential condition.

My titles reflect the feeling of the painting and asks the viewer to consider their personal created identity as it relates to others. As i try to define and discover how identity is created and allow the viewer to come to their own conclusions as to how they see themselves and others. And maybe consider how your presence affects the space around you.

Created during a period of heightened civic tension, the work reflects on how identity is read, assigned, and enacted within contemporary power structures. Questions of belonging, visibility, and vulnerability circulate without narrative or illustration. Rather than depicting events, the work focuses on perception itself – how recognition forms, how judgment takes shape, and how the face becomes a point of encounter between the individual and surrounding systems.

The viewer is not passive. Engagement asks for self-recognition as much as interpretation. Each encounter raises questions about how we read others, what we project onto unfamiliar faces, and how quickly perception becomes classification. The work invites viewers to locate themselves within this exchange – to consider shared ground, difference, and relational responsibility.

Because the paintings are symbolic, ambiguous, and slightly abstract, they ask the viewer to slow down and look deeper. They create space to reflect on identity as something negotiated rather than fixed, and on recognition as an ethical act. The work offers no conclusions – only an invitation to witness, reflect, and reconsider how humanity is encountered through the act of looking and thinking.