Soft Tissues
The intimate burdens that we carry
The body remembers what the mind would rather not. Fear, anxiety, and grief do not stay where they happen. They settle into posture, into the set of a jaw, into the place a hand goes without being told to. Soft Tissues paints that settling. These are portraits of psychological weight made physical: the body as the place where feeling actually lives, long after the mind has tried to move on.
This isn't a metaphor I invented so much as one I kept running into. Contemporary trauma research has increasingly converged on the idea that difficult experience is stored somatically, not just narrated mentally: that it shows up as chronic tension, altered stress response, a nervous system still bracing for something that already happened. The body, in this understanding, isn't a bystander to psychological pain. It's an archive of it. Soft Tissues takes that archive as its subject, painting the exact places where the interior state breaks the surface and becomes visible.
Each piece works from the same premise as psychoanalysis itself: that what a person cannot or will not say aloud finds another way out. The paintings are confessional in the most literal sense, admissions made by the body on behalf of a mind that hasn't caught up yet.
The series uses cognitive dissonance to heighten its emotional impact. Pieces are often painted in a high key range of brilliant color, subjects posed in gestures that read as gentle, tender, even soft. Underneath that surface, each piece deals with heavy subject matter: self harm, delusion, hopelessness. That gap between surface and content is close to what Freud called “The Uncanny”, the unsettling feeling that arrives when something familiar is revealed to conceal something else entirely. The brightness and gentleness aren't decoration. They're the heimlich shell the difficult material hides inside, so that the viewer's initial read is comfort, and the discomfort only arrives once they've already leaned in.
Soft Tissues is the body of work that follows Visions, moving from the eye, where emotion is first legible, into the rest of the body, where it settles for good.
Oil on panel · 60 × 60 cm · 2026
Oil on panel · 60 × 60 cm · 2026