Faking It 2X
Media - Acrylics, candle wax and garden grit on woodboard
Dimensions - 46 x 56 cm
Price - £5,800
Delivered directly by the artist, by hand, within the UK
Faking It 2x stages identity as a site of fracture, rehearsal, and self-mythology. Composed as a double self-portrait, the work overlays two faces of the same subject — neither simply mirrored nor duplicated, but caught in the uneasy space between disclosure and invention. The linework holds a nervous precision, as if the portrait is being sketched and erased in the same gesture; the features slip between presence and disappearance, echoing the instability of the persona we offer to others and the subtler, more insidious fabrications we maintain for ourselves.
The orientation-flexibility of the canvas is an integral conceptual choice. Rotated, the work becomes another psychological proposition: faces dissolve, reform, and contradict one another. Identity becomes a mutable field, not a fixed declaration. The painting insists on the viewer’s complicity — every angle is a wager on what we want to see, and what we’re avoiding.
At its core, Faking It is a study of the lies we tell — outwardly, to maintain coherence in a world hungry for easy definitions; and inwardly, in the quiet, private negotiations of who we believe ourselves to be.
The material language is critical. Candle wax seeps into the acrylic, softening certain edges while hardening others, functioning almost like emotional residue caught in the act of cooling. Garden grit is embedded directly into the paint, introducing a raw, earthly texture that breaks the illusion of the canvas as a neutral field. These intrusions operate as a kind of physical truth-telling: the outside world, the real world, is literally part of the face we construct.
The hyper-saturated palette — blazing pinks, acidic yellows, and shadowed violets — creates a terrain that feels both cosmetic and eruptive. It gestures toward the theatricality of self-presentation while hinting at the volatility beneath it. Rotated, the work becomes another psychological proposition entirely: faces dissolve, recombine, contradict. Identity becomes contingent, shifting, undecidable.
Faking It ultimately stages the delicate violence of self-performance. It examines the lies told outwardly for coherence and the deeper lies we tell inwardly to survive ourselves. The painting doesn’t settle those contradictions; it keeps them alive, pulsing at the surface.