The wall.الجدار.

The question is in the title and the painting refuses to answer it. The same lines that bind the faces together are the lines that cage them. Connection and capture are drawn with one stroke.

A person assembled entirely out of boxes, sitting on another box. The head is calm because the body has already agreed to the shape it was given.

No single figure, only the weave. Every cell has its own small window and its own small eye, and the whole thing holds together because none of the parts can leave. A hive is a collective that forgot it had members.

The darkest of the crowd paintings. Everywhere you look something is already looking back. Being seen and being watched are the same condition here.

The face is still and the world behind it is falling at speed. The eye is closed because the only way to hold a pace like that is to stop looking at it.

The naming is left to whoever stands in front of it. The painting is finished. The title is the one part handed back to the viewer.

The claim is repeated twice because once is not enough to believe it. The figure is limitless the way a crowd is limitless, by being made of too many selves to count.

Calmer than the hive. Here the connection is chosen, two figures sharing a border instead of being crushed into one. The earth tone lets them breathe.

A demand more than a title. The figures are packed against their little houses, and the painting asks for the one thing the composition will not give them, room.

The announcement is calm and the faces are not. Something has finished and no one in the picture is sure they wanted it to.

Two questions, no map. The figures are placed clearly on the page and still do not know where they are. Being located is not the same as being found.

Every figure is mostly doors. None of them are open. The possibility of exit is built into the body and never used.

Nature drawn as three planted figures, half tree and half person, rooted to thin stems. Whatever grows here grew on purpose and cannot move.

The exhaustion of stillness. The figure has done nothing and is worn out by it, ringed in color it did not ask for. Idleness is not rest.

Error at the top, a trail underneath, the sentence cut off mid-word. The mind glitches and the body keeps walking the path anyway, unfinished.

The most inward of the set. The figure folds over its own hands and the question hangs unanswered in the dark around it. No crowd, just the one self asking.

The clearest figure in the body of work, given the hardest question. Two mismatched wings, both arms open, and no settled answer about when the self arrives.

A chart of faces, each a candidate for the same person. The question assumes you have to pick. The painting suspects you do not get to.

The title is an apology and a defense at once. The figure stays connected to the others by effort, holding a position that takes everything it has.

The field is crowded, figures pressing into each other, eyes everywhere, orange burning through the purple and teal. The instruction at the top is not subtle. Get out.

The faces at the bottom have more life in them than the three at the top. The painting knows this and does not try to fix it.

A figure steps forward out of a blue opening while the edges of the page still burn with where it came from. The void is not empty. It is the doorway the self walks out of.

A totem of faces stacked into one body, each with its own eyes, none of them looking the same way. The word at the foot of it reads disconnected.

Eyes everywhere, watching and watched. A crowd of faces pressed flat against the surface until there is no room left to look away.

Two figures standing close, drawn plainly. The closeness is in the posture, not in the faces.

A figure folded out of color blocks, the face calm at the top. The word love is buried in the surface rather than declared on it.

A bright figure with the words let, just, leave set down its side, and a tangle of scribbled line beside it that will not settle.

Faces crowded into one plane, every eye leaking, every mouth open on the same search for the way out.

The title is hand lettered across the top, split in half. One face, cut off from the color around it.

A sketchbook page. A split heart for a face, a crowd above it, and the admission written small: bigger than myself.

Tall figures on bottle bodies, faces budding off them like fruit. The words are there, Nature and Fear, written by hand as though the painting needed to name what it already knew.

A profile filled with machinery instead of a face. The word repeats three times because once was not convincing.

Faces broken into panels and reassembled wrong, every piece keeping its own eye.

A tower of grinning faces refusing to go. Last act, never die, and then the quiet correction: really.

An assembly line of faces and parts, packed edge to edge, the word stamped across it: manufactured.

The room is a box and the box is watching. Breaking it is written on the wall, which is not the same as doing it.

The road forks and keeps forking. Every face along it watches the choice instead of making one.

They arrive without announcing what they are. The teeth run down the body like a seam that holds the visit together.

The chain at the top is made of mouths. What binds is also what bites, and the binding is called fate so it is easier to accept.

A second pass at the same question. This time the connections get room to breathe, and the space between the figures does as much work as the figures.

Falling and failing share one word here. The faces cannot tell which of the two they are doing, and the grid holds them either way.

Made while listening to music that named the feeling before the painting did. If a painting can make it easier to talk about what is loud inside a head, it has already done its work.

Let’s go far, far, far away and leave everything behind.

He thought silence would protect him.

Then came the song, and came the voice.

SPEAK… SPEAK… SPEAK….

And for the first time in years, he did.

Now, he waits.

Life always regenerates.

Night. Speed. Floundering. The road is long. Nothing lasts.

For I am nothing but us, and the whole is nothing but you.