Absolution

Description

Absolution” is a portrait built from cleansing that never becomes complete. The image is dominated by blues and whites, a palette that evokes cold light, water, bruising air, and the sterile promise of being made new. The surface is worked and re-worked, with dragged paint, roughened layers, and partial erasures that treat the face less as a fixed identity and more as a site of repair. The portrait appears, then slips, then returns, as if the act of forgiveness requires repetition, and as if the self resists the simplicity of being declared “clean.” The halo is the most direct symbol, but it does not behave like certainty. It is thick, physical, uneven, a ring that feels carried rather than earned. It hovers above the head like a question: who grants absolution, and what does it cost. Against the coolness of the face and background, the yellow reads as heat, presence, and insistence. It could be grace, it could be judgment, it could be the memory of grace, or the demand for it. The ambiguity is the point. Absolution is rarely a clean line. More often, it is an argument between what you want to be forgiven for, and what you can live with remembering. The eyes hold the work together. They are not romantic, they are watchful, tired, and human. Around them, the paint breaks into fragments and streaks, creating an atmosphere of noise, like thoughts looping, like the mind trying to rinse itself of a past that keeps tinting the water. If there is hope here, it is not decorative. It is the stubborn fact that the face remains, even after all the scrubbing. The painting does not promise purity. It offers something harder: survival, and the possibility that forgiveness is real, but it arrives with texture, residue, and proof of the struggle it took to reach it.