Adrenaline Dulcis
Media - Acrylics on canvas
Dimensions - 95 x 124 cm
Price - £12,000
Delivered directly by the artist, by hand, within the UK
This self-portrait positions the artist’s identity not as a fixed likeness but as a site of negotiation, collision, and recalibration. Executed in acrylic on canvas, the work adopts a confrontational frontal composition, yet resists psychological closure. The face is present, insistently so, but structurally destabilised—caught between coherence and disassembly.
The figure emerges through a geometry of containment: bold, architectural blocks of blue, red, grey, and black are intersected by assertive ochre lines that function like boundaries, conduits, or imposed routes. These lines frame and fracture the visage simultaneously, suggesting systems—social, psychological, inherited—through which identity is channelled, constrained, or forced to reroute. The face does not sit passively within this structure; it pushes against it.
Chromatically, the work is deliberately high-contrast and non-naturalistic. Saturated blues dominate, carrying associations of emotional depth and restraint, while the reds—thick, physical, almost visceral—introduce pressure and exposure. Drips run freely across the surface, undermining the rigid geometry beneath. This tension between control and release is central. The paint behaves as much as it asserts.
The facial features are partially masked by colour fields, most notably around the eyes, which are simultaneously sharpened and obscured. This creates a double gesture: the gaze confronts the viewer while refusing total legibility. Identity here is not confessional; it is defended. The work acknowledges experience and accumulation without narrativising them. Instead, it insists on presence without explanation.
As an auto-portrait, the painting rejects vanity and resemblance in favour of psychological accuracy. It aligns more closely with a lineage of existential and post-identity portraiture than with expressive autobiography. The self is rendered as something constructed under pressure—reshaped by experience, yet not erased by it.