In this latest postpainting portrait, the figure of the neocon emerges not as a man but as a spectral smear—an apparition constructed from the residue of policy, greed, and blood. His face, fractured into swathes of red, ochre, and ash, is less a likeness than an afterimage of ideology: the remains of a worldview that has outlived its architects. The vending machine at the edge of the canvas, glowing with the words NEOCON DREAMS, crystallizes the transaction at the heart of this mythology: war and suffering packaged as consumables, dispensed at the push of a button, endlessly replenished.
The work resists portraiture in any traditional sense. Instead, it stages the collapse of the subject into abstraction, a reminder that power itself is a smear—difficult to locate, harder still to hold accountable. The painted distortions suggest both the digital glitch and the historical scar, dragging the image between epochs: one eye fixed on the grainy newsreel of the 20th century, the other blinking toward the algorithmic chaos of the 21st.
This is not a painting of a man; it is a painting of the echo chamber he leaves behind. The neocon here is a ruin in motion, a monument already eroded, a ghost tethered to the fluorescent hum of his own vending-machine dreams.
