Anger, 2017

“Ichor” takes up the moment that follows the end of the fight. It is not an image of death, but of its presence – the moment when drama gives way to silence and ritual passes into memory. The title refers to the Greek notion of ichor – the blood of the gods, symbolising the crossing of the boundary between the human and the timeless.

A lightened palette of pinks, reds and whites transforms the matter of the painting into a space suspended between the corporeal and the luminous. Dense accumulations of paint do not describe a wound or violence, but a process of transformation. It is a painting in which physicality gradually gives way to memory, and sacrifice takes on a symbolic dimension.

Within the Corrida series the work becomes a reflection on the inevitability of passing, and on the way ritual gives death a meaning that reaches beyond a single event.