26/08/2026
Months ago, on a beach in Spain, I found two perfectly round, grey river stones. They carried years of being polished by water.
I immediately wanted to put them on my eyes. They reminded me of the coins placed with the dead. I wanted to photograph that image.
So I took them home.
And then they lay on my sink for months.
A lot happened.
When I finally took the self-portrait this summer, I wasn’t trying to make an image about what had happened to me. I was mostly following an image that had been sitting in my head for months.
I loved how unsettling it turned out. I looked dead and alive at the same time. Withdrawn from the world, almost without identity. There was a certain surrender in it, but no peace. There was still so much tension, sensuality, something unmistakably alive.
I loved the photograph so much that I wanted to paint it.
And somehow I started painting it differently too. Wetter, thinner, more fluid than I usually work. Letting the paint drip, wiping it away again, building colour in thin transparent layers.
Only afterwards, while trying to understand what I had made and searching for its title, something embarrassingly obvious occurred to me:
Water.
Death.
The space between fighting and letting go.
The stones shaped by water.
The body in transition.
Even the paint itself turned fluid.
I realized I hadn’t consciously made a painting about my accident.
But somehow I had painted my way right back to it.
Apparently, some things find their own way to the surface.
Agonia, 2026
Oil on canvas
50 × 70 cm
