Thrashed Times
2026
In Thrashed Times, painting survives its own destruction. What begins as a fragment—torn, cropped, bent, stained, folded, partially obscured—becomes the fundamental unit of a sculptural language. The works occupy a territory between painting and object, image and remnant, monument and ruin. Each form appears less composed than recovered, as though excavated from a future archaeology of colour.
The title suggests both violence and duration. "Thrashed" evokes abrasion, exhaustion, impact, and repeated handling; "Times" invokes history, memory, and the accumulated pressures of living through successive states of uncertainty. Together, the phrase proposes a condition in which images are not preserved intact but are worn down by the very forces they attempt to register.
Throughout the series, colour operates as both presence and residue. Acidic pinks, Indian yellows, deep ultramarines, titanium whites, bruised violets and dense blacks emerge not as decorative choices but as strata. They appear embedded within the surface, surfacing and receding like geological deposits exposed through erosion. The paintings seem less painted than weathered. Drips, stains, and imperfect transitions become temporal records rather than expressive gestures. Surface functions as an archive of pressure.
What is remarkable is the instability of scale. The original fragments are intimate, almost incidental. Yet when imagined as monumental sculptures they acquire an unexpected architectural authority. Curved edges become horizons. Torn corners become buttresses. Stains become weather systems. This transformation from discarded fragment to monumental form destabilises conventional hierarchies between the provisional and the permanent. The works ask whether fragility itself can become a form of monumentality.
The black works are especially significant. In these pieces, colour is not absent but withheld. Dense jet-black skins obscure and protect underlying chromatic histories, allowing traces of colour to leak through the surface like suppressed memories. Black becomes an active material: a veil, a sealant, a covering that simultaneously conceals and reveals. These works carry an almost funereal weight while remaining strangely luminous.
The titanium white sculptures reverse this dynamic. Here whiteness acts not as purity but as accumulation. The thick white surfaces resemble layers of repair, concealment, or sedimentation. Beneath them, glimpses of colour remain visible, suggesting histories that cannot be fully erased. The result is a tension between revelation and concealment, between the desire to cover over and the persistence of what remains.
Seen collectively, Thrashed Times belongs to a broader contemporary interest in material stress, accumulation, and transformation, where form emerges through pressure, layering, and endurance rather than ideal composition. Contemporary sculpture and painting increasingly treat surfaces as records of what has been applied, endured, bent, or eroded over time.
Yet the series remains distinct in its refusal of spectacle. These works do not present themselves as complete objects. Instead, they remain open-ended propositions—fragments that retain the memory of another state. Their power lies precisely in this incompleteness. They suggest that contemporary experience is no longer best represented through coherent images but through remnants, interruptions, and partial recoveries.
Thrashed Times ultimately proposes a poetics of survival. These are forms that have passed through abrasion and emerged altered but not diminished. They stand as monuments not to certainty or permanence, but to endurance itself: battered, provisional, and quietly radiant.