«Fragments of Consciousness»

Fragments of Consciousness, original painting

The QR code was born in a factory. In 1994 Masahiro Hara and his team at Denso Wave in Japan designed it to label car parts, because ordinary barcodes held too little and slowed the line. Nobody planned for a square of black dots to end up on menus, tickets and lampposts.

That square is the starting point of this glitch portrait.

A young woman looks up and away, her brown hair pulled back, loose strands blowing at her temple. One side of her face is painted with care: the eye, the lip, the soft skin of the cheek. The other side comes apart into rectangles of blue, orange, pink, green and yellow, as if the image could not finish loading. Around her sit the leftovers of a screen: two QR codes on yellow squares, a barcode down the right edge, lines of scrambled text that almost read, a neon pink strip.

Artists have been breaking images on purpose for a long time. In 1965 Nam June Paik put a magnet on a television set and watched the picture tear into abstract patterns. A few years later, in Big Self-Portrait (1967-68), Chuck Close built a giant face out of a grid. I wanted to put those two ideas on one glitch portrait and see which one wins.

The eyes stay whole. Whatever the pixels do to the rest of her, someone is still looking. For me that is the point of the title: consciousness arrives in fragments, and we keep calling the sum a person. It is contemporary pop art at full size, statement wall art that does not sit politely on the wall.

This is an original pop art painting, 120 x 90 cm, made in 2025. This original is still available and ready to ship. Most of my other originals are already in private collections, and I paint new ones to order in any size. A hand-finished lithograph of this work also exists; to order the original or the lithograph, message me on Instagram or by email.