Carnival of Instability

The Carnival of Instability is a theatre of shifting identities. Across this evolving series of large-scale paintings, figures emerge as masks, apparitions, and fragments, constantly changing roles as they appear. A cartoon witness exaggerates itself to absurdity; a monumental head floats between idol and caricature; a ghost becomes nothing more than an unfinished gesture. Each figure resists singular meaning, staging instead the restless multiplicity of identity under contemporary conditions of spectacle, technology, and fractured attention.

Masks recur throughout the series, recalling both ancient ritual and contemporary avatars. In Three Heads, they appear as deities and companions, monumental yet cartoonish, sacred yet unstable. In Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, masks proliferate: angel, witness, trickster, apparition. These are not portraits of individuals but shifting presences, fragments of the psyche made visible. The manifesto offers the key: “I am many and I am one. I am swarm and I am icon. Do not mistake me for truth. I am performing.” The paintings echo this declaration. Figures flicker, identities dissolve and reform. Survival here is not confession but play, not essence but performance.

Symbols of order surface but do not endure. In Red Square, a bold block of red hovers between meanings  screen, void, blockade, shrine  yet never stabilises. Bureaucratic tally marks falter, architectural fragments wobble, schematic houses appear too fragile to shelter. Authority is summoned only to collapse into ambiguity. Similarly, the theatrical red ground of Standing on the Shoulders of Giants recalls the banners of spectacle, propaganda, and mass gatherings, yet it destabilises rather than unifies. Instead of clarity, it produces theatre, turning urgency into instability.

Ritual also haunts these canvases. Cruciform angels, monumental heads, votive figures: all recall sacred traditions where masks and symbols mediated between self and cosmos. Yet the rituals here are no longer directed toward gods of nature or ancestors. They have been reconfigured in a contemporary register where devotion collapses into circuitry. The triangular glyph marked “ON” functions as both rune and power switch, invocation and device. The parody is not of divinity itself but of the absurdity of worshipping systems of extraction  platforms, networks, corporations  as though they were divine. The monumental head in Three Heads recalls the weight of the sacred, but its cartoon grin and schematic distortions point to the fragility of these new idols, the technological and economic powers we treat with ritual devotion. The paintings hold space for the sacred while exposing how easily worship can be displaced into parody when reverence is misdirected.

If ritual gestures toward devotion, other works embody the condition of exhaustion. In Fragments of Ghosts, incompleteness is the central form: outlines dissolve, gestures remain half-finished, and icons of interruption scatter across the surface. Procrastination here is reframed not as personal failure but as a systemic effect, the residue of attention drained by the demands of constant production and visibility. The skeletal mask and dangling fragments become figures of depletion, ghosts of selves scattered by platforms that promise empowerment while producing exhaustion. The painting itself becomes a haunted interface, both diary of artistic struggle and critique of the systems that fracture focus.

The material language of the series reinforces its resistance to stability. Raw canvas absorbs each mark directly; spray paint hovers over gestural brushwork; scars, drips, and revisions remain visible. This refusal of polish resists the pristine aesthetics of commodified surfaces, insisting instead on painting as process, immediacy, and presence. The canvases are less finished objects than provisional events  unstable, alive, open to change.

Taken together, the works of The Carnival of Instability articulate a vision of identity under pressure: fractured by spectacle, mediated by technology, haunted by ritual, depleted by attention economies. Yet the series does not collapse into despair. It embraces instability as theatre, parody as resistance, and performance as survival. What is staged here is not hidden depth but visible swarm. It is not unity but multiplicity, not essence but mask. The viewer is not offered resolution but invited into ambiguity  to stand within the red field, to witness the collapse of order, to encounter the ghost of distraction, to recognise that survival itself is performance.

In this sense, The Carnival of Instability is less an archive of paintings than a manifesto in image: a refusal of stability, a staging of multiplicity, a theatre where identity remains provisional, unstable, and alive.