Acrylic on canvas, painted wood. 20×20 cm
Shattered Icons is a constellation of thirty small paintings, all unique pieces made in acrylic on canvas, seeking to suspend an imaginary we believed to be stable. Each individual character, recognizable yet distant, seems to hold onto an emotion that no longer belongs to the world it came from.
The seriality builds a redundant narrative, insisting obsessively on a single point: many of these characters inhabited the artist’s childhood, nourishing that implicit promise that everything would, somehow, turn out fine. But here that illusion cracks: the faces that always guaranteed a happy ending have in fact proven incapable of sustaining it. Life is merciless, and there is never a happy ending.
Shattered Icons is a repeated gesture that, painting after painting, lets a crack surface.
The small, almost intimate format amplifies a tension in which the tear has no room to expand, remaining compressed; the thirty paintings offer no answers.
They do not ask for empathy, do not seek drama. They are a minimal inventory, an archive of fragility that calls into question the trust we place in the images that raised us.