How does it feel to lose the one you love, to be a prisoner of the heart, to ache without the hope of healing? These are the themes of ‘Love, Lost’, a deeply human, personal example of narrative Neo-expressionism that encourages exploration and repays close attention.
The genesis of this piece spans 15 years. It begins with a wedding invitation adorned with a pink paper leaf. That delicate tissue survived all this time to become the artist’s personal proxy, exhaled, expelled, untethered, abandoned: drifting away off the edge of the canvas.
That is the story of the left, the departed, the frayed and discarded.
On the right is a male figure, filling much of the frame, naked and alone. Lost in reverie, his eyes are closed; he cannot see what he has lost.
Or perhaps he does not want to.
The rosebud in the figure’s open heart was once wedded to the leaf, the two glued together, seemingly inseparable, but is displayed here on its own, exposed.
The heart knows what the head denies.
