Suits and Leaders
Postpainting
Circa 2025
Suits and Leaders captures a banquet at the end of empathy — a long table dressed in glass and diplomacy, where the masks of statesmanship crack under the weight of paint and power.
The suits are all there: poised, indistinguishable, calibrated for the cameras. But two faces push through the abstraction — unmistakable even in the smear. One orange-lit, smirking through blurred bravado. The other pale and calculating, forged in conflict. Neither speaks, yet both dominate. Together they anchor the image, not as guests but as architects of the silence.
Around them, diplomacy becomes farce. Crystal glasses shimmer in a room heavy with policy and denial. No one touches the food. No one touches the truth. The surface is pristine, but the canvas ruptures — a chaos of brushstrokes erupts across the centre, swallowing detail in red, black, and flesh tones. This isn’t a glitch. It’s a scream, politely ignored.
The painting doesn’t depict a meeting. It stages a ritual — where theatre replaces action, and the optics of leadership are worth more than its consequences. The leaders are not just present; they’re imprinted, smeared into the very fabric of the image, like old blood beneath fresh polish.
Suits and Leaders asks not who governs, but how we’ve come to accept governance as performance. Where spectacle stands in for justice, and history is written in soundbites and oil paint. The table is long. The consequences are longer.
And yet they sit. And smile. And wait for dessert.
