Render, 2026
Acrylic on canvas
122 cm x 91,5 cm
Artist’s Statement
Render is concerned with what the brain does when nothing is asked of it. The default mode network — active in rest, in self-referential thought, in the mind’s continuous rehearsal of its own identity — is the neural substrate of the face that will not stop assembling itself, even in darkness. The face materialises from a dark ground through successive layers of white and grey: scraped back, reworked, partially erased. It is never fully arrived.
This is not a portrait of a person but of a process — the mind’s compulsive, largely unconscious labour of constructing a self from accumulated experience, memory, and loss. The verb carries the painting’s method as its meaning. To render is to depict, to strip a surface back, and to coat in successive layers until something underneath becomes legible. Each sense is enacted on the canvas; none resolves into a final image.
The work is preoccupied with visibility as an ethical condition: what it means to be seen in extremis, and by whom. The face surfaces toward the viewer without ever fully meeting the gaze, suspended at the threshold where recognition becomes responsibility. Its incompleteness is not failure but condition — the self as perpetual draft, assembled and disassembled in the same gesture.
Emerging from a clinical practice spent attending to bodies at their most vulnerable, Render asks whether the act of looking can hold a person who is still, and always, in the process of becoming.
