Blasphemous Saints

Every culture builds a pantheon out of whatever it actually kneels to, whether or not it calls that kneeling worship. Ours has slowly and quietly replaced its saints with the worship of the uncomfortable situations we find ourselves in today. We no longer light candles for intercession, but we perform for cameras we can't see, and we've made a kind of peace with violence that should horrify us.

Blasphemous Saints takes that substitution literally. Each painting is a portrait of one of these unacknowledged idols, rendered in the visual language of the icon: the frontal stillness of a cloaked and often relic-bearing figure.

The figures are not allegories so much as the characterization of ideas that became too persistent to leave abstract. The Queen of Eyes, the saint of Unveiled Truths, holds a mass of disembodied eyes cradled against a robe of deep blue, more arms spilling from the folds of her cloak, set against the gold field traditionally reserved for the divine. Where an icon's gold ground is a blessing, hers is closer to an accusation: the pressure of being watched, the quiet omnipresence of a life performed for an audience that never fully leaves. The Cantor of the Sanguine Psalm, the saint of Brutality, extends the same logic to violence, the thing we claim to condemn and have in practice made into liturgy, repeated so often it has its own psalm.