Kintsugi

A gold line traverses the centre of the face from top to bottom: this is not a wound, it is kintsugi — that Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with golden lacquer, making of the rupture not a shame but a value. The closed-eyed figure, traversed by gold at forehead, temple and neck, is not a broken figure: she is a figure who chose to become more precious in her fracture. The pictorial mastery is absolute — living marble skin, silver hair, blue-grey ground of the blue hour — and it is entirely in the service of one simple gesture: to say that gold goes to the places that have suffered. Oil and gold leaf on canvas, 120 × 120 cm, 2025.