«I see you»

In 1791 the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham published his plan for the Panopticon, a prison where one guard in a central tower could watch every cell. The prisoners could never tell if the guard was looking at that moment, and that doubt alone was meant to keep them in line. Two centuries later the tower fits in a pocket. This digital glitch painting starts there.

I wanted a face that looks back at whoever is looking. One big eye sits in the middle of the canvas, black lashes, a tiny pink square caught in the pupil. A hand with a long pink nail slides across the lower face, and a second hand with a pale lilac nail reaches in from the upper left. Around them the skin breaks into stripes and blocks of yellow, turquoise, orange, magenta and black. Near the bottom the picture tears into horizontal bands, like a screen losing its signal, and small pixel squares and black bars sit on top of the paint.

Artists have been breaking the face for a long time. Picasso split it into planes in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in 1907, and in Weeping Woman in 1937 he showed a face pressed against a handkerchief. Warhol repeated and wore out a face in his Marilyn Diptych in 1962, with one half fading away. My version of the broken face is a digital glitch painting made by hand: acrylic on canvas, 70x60 cm, 2021, in the spirit of contemporary pop art.

This original pop art painting has one rule: the hand covers the face but leaves the eye open. I like that. It hides and stares at once, which is how most of us live online. As statement wall art it does not sit quietly in a room, because the eye follows you.

Most of my original paintings are already in private collections, but I paint originals to order in any size. To ask about this one, message me on Instagram or by email. A hand-finished lithograph of this work also exists, and you can order it through Instagram or email.