This piece carries the ghost of Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat, but not its theater. I wasn’t searching to repeat the master’s hand — I wanted to fracture his image, to let its bones speak through my own geometry.
Marat’s limp arm, the quill, the body fading into stillness — they remain here, but abstracted, softened into curves and muted fields of color. Where David carved a stage for political martyrdom, I sought a quieter register: solitude, memory, the inevitability of decline.
Yet the revolutionary charge cannot be erased. David painted not just a death, but a symbol — the body as banner, art as weapon. To recompose this image today is to acknowledge how creation has always been tied to upheaval, to rupture, to the moment when art crosses into history.
This is less about Marat, and more about translation. About how an image of revolt and sacrifice can be broken apart, reshaped, and carried forward in a language that is mine. An homage not through replication, but through transformation — from revolution into reflection.
