No Matter What

A woman grips a green bottle against a sulfurous yellow background, her gaze sliding sideways—wary, exhausted, unwilling to look directly at the viewer. The palette is Caravaggio filtered through dive-bar amber: gold leaf light without any gold leaf, all atmosphere and implied decay.

The title inverts the classical promise. This is what the golden age actually looks like—not triumph, but endurance. The white t-shirt, the pearl earring, the bare minimum of composure.

Hannah Arendt sits on a wooden chair against a dark ground, cigarette raised, shadow falling behind her like a second self. Painted in loose, urgent strokes—more gesture than realism—the portrait catches Arendt in a moment of intellectual stillness: thinking, watching, waiting.

The red shoes anchor the composition and pull the eye down from the smoke. The title references Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil—the observation that the most dangerous acts are often carried out not by monsters but by ordinary people who refuse to think critically.

This painting was selected by the press as a representative work of the exhibition and appeared on the cover of Chelsea Now’s July 2025 edition.

A woman in a red tank top strains uphill on bare rock, carrying another figure, a version of herself, on her shoulders—a modern Sisyphus whose boulder is a human body. The sky is clear. The landscape is green and open. She is grimacing, not collapsing.

The title comes from the final line of Albert Camus’s 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus—his argument that the struggle itself is enough to fill a heart, that meaning is made in the act of carrying on. In the context of this exhibition, built around artists who create no matter what, the painting functions as both metaphor and self-portrait.

Two figures sit in armchairs in a cool blue room, flanked by a cat in a lion’s mane and a dog in a bunny suit. The postures are formal, almost portrait-stiff. Paintings hang on the wall behind them—X and Y, the chromosomal shorthand, rendered as abstract marks.

The title states what the image shows: a family defined by its relationships rather than its biology. The costumes on the animals mirror the quiet absurdity of the entire arrangement—identity as performance, family as whatever you build.