Genur.art

Screen-printed surreal portrait on a flat vermilion field. A 25-year-old woman's face fills the frame from brow to chin against a solid saturated orange-red background with no depth, no shadow and no horizon — the colour is a wall, not a place. She is rendered near-monochrome, warm off-white and black, as though printed in two inks over the orange. Her dark hair is scraped back and out of frame. From within the hair, a dozen small pale hands emerge and reach down over her face: two cupped across her mouth, three fanned over one cheek, others crawling toward the eye, fingers splayed and slightly too long, all of them calm and deliberate rather than violent. Her one uncovered eye looks straight out of the picture with complete composure, dark and wet, the only place with real depth in the whole image. The surface is a print, not a photograph: coarse halftone dots visible in the mid-tones, a fine misregistration of the ink shifting the black plate a hair to the left so every hand carries a thin orange ghost along its edge, paper grain throughout, and a slightly uneven ink lay in the flat field. The palette is exactly three values — vermilion, bone white, black — with nothing else allowed in. The composition is dead centre and symmetrical, cropped tight so the hands run out of the frame on both sides. The mood is unsettling and completely serene, a horror image with perfect manners.