Strife of the Faces

This work emerged in July 2025, following a period of psychic compression and political exposure during a visit to Washington, DC. It belongs to the same inner weather system as the Silken Figures and the Gateway works, yet occupies a more contested register. The influence of Giacometti, Max Ernst, and Paul Klee is present not as citation but as shared grammar: attenuated bodies, archetypal fragments, figures caught between emergence and erasure.

The surface functions as a field of contention rather than a unified scene. Multiple personas appear simultaneously, not sequentially. Figures overlap, interrupt one another, and vie for articulation. Limbs double back on themselves. Faces fracture into profiles and masks. No single figure claims sovereignty. What unfolds here is not harmony but negotiation—an interior struggle over visibility, voice, and form.

What might initially read as unfinished is structurally complete. The work refuses resolution because the psychic condition it records had none. It documents a moment in which archetypal forces, personal histories, and imagined futures were all pressing forward at once, each demanding embodiment. The drawing does not select a victor. It bears witness to the struggle itself.

Riv Ha-Panim—“the strife of the faces”—names this condition precisely. Panim in Hebrew signifies not only faces but presence, aspect, and orientation. The work holds a cross-section of becoming under pressure, where identity has not yet integrated and the psyche has not yet decided which self will step forward. It is incomplete only in the way living systems are incomplete: open, charged, and still in motion.