The 10thE State

A single sealed habitat, walled at its boundary, where every hour is supplied and every need is met before it is felt. At its centre stands the Factory — employer, church, parliament and parent at once — humming a frequency the residents have long stopped being able to hear.

These paintings are dispatches from inside that arrangement. They move through its rooms like a camera that has grown a conscience: the boardrooms where policy is decided, the high-rise flats stacked like filing, the supermarket, the cinema, the disco — every pleasure pre-approved, every distraction on schedule. The citizens are kept comfortable, medicated, entertained and watched. The drones go up at dusk. The hunters come back at dawn.

Two instincts share the studio. One builds the architecture of control — the announcement, the orator, the bureau that decides what light you are allowed to stand in. The other tends the flesh — figures that smear and buckle and dissolve, faces caught in the act of becoming meat. Between them the series finds its register, tender and brutal at once, painted in a loaded, dragging brushwork that still insists the human face is worth fighting for.

And at the edges, the wild returns. Aardvarks in the corridors of power, a fox at the watering hole, hybrids massing at the fence — the Estate’s repressed, leaking back through the wall. The 10th E State is not a warning about some future. It is a portrait of the present, with the lighting turned up until we can finally see it.