And They'll Want to Tear My Heart Away
2026
Oil on linen
40 x 40 cm • 16 x 16 in
This is a deeply personal painting, which I began about a year and a half ago and which I feel brings my series Fractals Under Surreal Constraints to a fitting close. Beyond fertility, whether biological or artistic, it raises the question: what remains of us when we are stripped of what is essential to us?
The work was born in response to an external event, a social dictate that could have “taken away my right” to paint. I then felt dispossessed of myself, just as endometriosis had dispossessed me for most of my life: the sensation of my entrails being stretched like chewing gum, of someone twisting them while snickering, each pull inflicting a pain both sharp and deep, so violent that I no longer know whether I will be able to keep breathing. With every expansion of my lungs drastically worsening the pain, and the slightest movement sheer torture, I must not move so much as an eyelash.
This is the deprivation of my free will and of a vital function: my power to create. I long to escape, to leave everything behind, but my endometriotic hand, the one that holds the paintbrush and the pencil, twists and stretches out of shape endlessly, held back by a taunting force. And elsewhere remains beyond my reach.
Once again, they will prevent me from creating, they will prevent me from leaving. And they'll want to tear my heart away.