Unseen
Acrylic-based ink and spray paint on paper
Executed 27th September 2024, London.
Unseen grew out of a moment I witnessed in London, a young boy standing completely still in the middle of the city’s movement, his eyes locked on the screen in his hands. He looked frozen, almost untouchable, as if enclosed in an invisible perimeter of light. There was something both ordinary and devastating about it. I carried that image back with me, and it became a meditation on disappearance in plain sight, what it means to be here, but not really present.
In the composition, the boy stands alone against an undefined ground. His body, drawn in confident strokes of acrylic-based ink, has a certain sculptural presence, yet it also feels ghostly, as if fading even while it stands. The only colour is the vivid spray of paint that covers his eyes and glows from his phone. The tones match exactly, a visual echo that binds device and blindness into one. For me, that chromatic unity captures the condition of modern perception: when we see only through the screen, we stop seeing the world.
As with many of my works from this period, I joined sheets of paper to create the surface. I left the seams visible on purpose. Their fragility is not incidental, it’s central to the meaning. The boy’s sense of self, like the paper itself, feels tenuously held together, patched and vulnerable, always at risk of tearing. Those visible joins have become, for me, a quiet metaphor for the mental and emotional stitching we now rely on to keep ourselves intact. The surface can hold the image, just, but it could also break at any moment.
Formally, I wanted to achieve a balance between austerity and empathy. The boy’s stillness carries both serenity and danger; it’s unclear whether he’s at peace or entirely absorbed. The absence of background gives him the gravity of an icon, suspended in a timeless, spaceless void. The colour, minimal but electric, creates tension: its beauty is what first attracts us, yet it’s that very allure that contains the warning. The spray-painted bar over the eyes, a recurring motif in my practice, took on new meaning here. It felt less like censorship and more like surrender, not about hiding from the world, but about being consumed by it.
What I wanted to express in Unseen was the quiet truth of how many young people live today, surrounded by light, yet slowly disappearing inside it. The boy isn’t blind because he’s ignorant; he’s blind because he’s seen too much. His mind is saturated with images and noise until there’s no space left for reflection. Looking back, Unseen feels like a culmination of the ideas I had been developing throughout those months. It brings together contrast, fragility and emotional weight in a way that felt whole, as if everything I had been exploring finally aligned. I’ve always believed that simplicity can carry tragedy more powerfully than excess, and this piece embodies that belief. The image compels the viewer to look harder at what has become invisible, the slow erosion of presence in a world perpetually observed yet rarely seen.
In many ways, Unseen is about what we’ve stopped noticing. The boy stands there quietly, a figure of our time, illuminated, distracted and fading before our eyes.