What gives birth to poetry? An answer is found in the Indian epic Ramayana:

"Once Valmiki saw a hunter kill a male bird and left its female counterpart distraught with grief. Filled with compassion for her, Valmiki cried out a rebuke to the hunter in a verse couplet in perfectly rhythmic and melodic form. Meditating on his own words, Valmiki had a divine epiphany: the true nature of poetry, shloka, is grief, shoka.”

“Bruises” began at the end of 2023, developed in direct response to escalating global unrest and violence. Rather than depicting human figures, the artist turned to the subject of insects — bodies crushed, wings torn, shells fractured, forms pressed into the ground until they become stains, impressions, near-abstract remnants. Paint is layered, smeared, and abraded; the surface itself enacts pressure, repetition, erosion. The choice of non-human subjects is deliberate — a displacement of the viewer’s habitual defenses, and a structural echo of the dehumanizing logic pervasive in violent rhetoric: when beings are classified as pests or threats, their destruction becomes not only permissible but unremarkable. These paintings attempt to make that logic visceral and manifest— to give form to the mechanisms by which life is reduced, silenced, and rendered expendable.