One single painting hangs in the large white gallery room. Its energy imbues the place. The painting, which measures 110 x 120 cm, is the aftermath of a performance from the spring of 2023. This was a ritual taking place in stillness, and, at the same time, an act of vandalism: an attack upon a painting of my own, Wallpaper for a Queen, 2021. The word wallpaper in the title evokes a day-dreaming situation. The painting is thus an invitation to daydream, the way one does sitting in a room at twilight gazing at the patterns and figures in the wallpaper. The painting was attacked violently by me, but the outcome is not violent: a new painting emerges in the end, a new invitation to contemplation.

The symbolic color palette of the attack, red and black, goes back to works titled Blood and Oil, that I did in New York during the Iraq war. The theme makes itself felt again.

The act springs out of a feeling of despair and sorrow for the time we live in. The energy of this state has, at the same time, a transformative force. Paradoxically, the destruction becomes a trigger that releases a new work, reminiscent of the painting process that philosopher Gilles Deleuze formulated using the word catastrophe. The catastrophe “does not take everything,” he said. How does that happen? On the plane of ideas, I imagine a single shard within the turmoil, a sliver, a tiny ray, which is capable of becoming an axis; one that can throw everything off in a new direction, countering the onslaught, reversing the energy. This is how a practitioner of martial arts redirects the qi of her opponent or even defies the forces of nature.

What is hope? Is hope a form of action? Acts of defiance and love, in the manner of St Francis “doing mercy” to those he encountered? Is hope the force we would call “in spite of it all”? The light in the eyes of someone, unsung actions of a post-heroic monumentality.