Oil on canvas, 30 × 39 cm
This painting was begun in Paris in the fall of 2023 while the artist was living illegally in a small shed in a public garden, without stable housing or formal studio, and completed in early winter 2025 after a year of wilderness living in Tuscany and six months in Mallorca.
Spanning two and a half years, the work carries the imprint of sustained displacement and solitude. The conditions under which it was made were not symbolic or chosen for effect. They functioned as an unsought initiation, echoing themes articulated by Robert Bly in Iron John, where modern men, lacking formal rites of passage, are left suspended in a prolonged adolescence, unable to fully inhabit adulthood, fatherhood, or elderhood.
Here, initiation arrived not through ceremony but through exposure: instability, silence, manual endurance, and life lived without insulation. The darkened skin is not metaphorical. It reflects time spent outdoors, alone with weather, labor, hunger, and quiet. The figure does not perform transformation; it bears it.
The village behind him remains intact, almost naïve in its repetition, while the gaze has settled into something earned rather than asserted. What returned to Paris in 2025 was not the man who left in 2023, but someone altered by having crossed without witnesses.
The painting stands as a record of that crossing.
Oil on canvas, 30 × 39 cm
This painting was begun in Paris in the fall of 2023 while the artist was living illegally in a small shed in a public garden, without stable housing or formal studio, and completed in early winter 2025 after a year of wilderness living in Tuscany and six months in Mallorca.
Spanning two and a half years, the work carries the imprint of sustained displacement and solitude. The conditions under which it was made were not symbolic or chosen for effect. They functioned as an unsought initiation, echoing themes articulated by Robert Bly in Iron John, where modern men, lacking formal rites of passage, are left suspended in a prolonged adolescence, unable to fully inhabit adulthood, fatherhood, or elderhood.
Here, initiation arrived not through ceremony but through exposure: instability, silence, manual endurance, and life lived without insulation. The darkened skin is not metaphorical. It reflects time spent outdoors, alone with weather, labor, hunger, and quiet. The figure does not perform transformation; it bears it.
The village behind him remains intact, almost naïve in its repetition, while the gaze has settled into something earned rather than asserted. What returned to Paris in 2025 was not the man who left in 2023, but someone altered by having crossed without witnesses.
The painting stands as a record of that crossing.
