‘And all that I truly love is the light, in my cousin's darling eyes’ by catmouse

Us Humans, we generally love flowers. We understand the powers of life's vitality through them, and symbolically they are representation of our condition; our joys, our sorrows, our passions, our sense of precious beauty.

I never liked painting flowers because of this cultural phenomenon I considered to be a cliché, I didn't even seem to be bothered to approach the subject matter with intention to subvert this tradition, in some ways I was finding symbolism meaningless, I wanted to be literate in my depictions. I wanted my painting to be akin to journalism.

Instead I started painting graffiti, I felt that art was depoliticised,and that the art world has a selective, discriminatory nature, this is not exactly a secret.

Start of the genocide; my Instagram feed was flooded. It's as if the term civilians ceased to exist, as if regular people were just obstacles towards greater, final goal. The sheer brutality; the denial, the cover up, demonisation hand in hand with dehumanisation. Making statements of support while looking the other way, the lazy positioning of championing human rights, the supremacy of all kinds all over in the air, relativisation of murdering children, and life going all along within “regular” contours.

I found some solace in paintings of Phillip Guston depicting KKKlansmen, the mundanity of those paintings just made sense. The KKK mask is a collective shadow under which we are all living.

The artwork is meant to be a mental landscape of an artist who bore witness, at least for a while. One of the greatest abilities of painting is that during the process, you are the painting, you become what you paint, as I was told by a fellow painter.

This painting is a big effort on that, and sometimes I think that maybe for 10 seconds, I could imagine what it's actually like to be in Gaza, to be target of this genocide… But no, not really, the horrors of the experience is something I can't fully comprehend, there's too much that would make me lose my mind before getting killed. If I was there I would have already been dead, I wouldn't have been able to endure. I am sure of this.

I've come back to painting flowers because it isn't possible to see with no filter, without looking through tinted glasses… And yet looking the other way can't be an option.

All profits go to Dignity for Palestine.

Open edition
A3 print