Byzantine Warriors

Made in 2019, Byzantine Warriors brings together figures that belong as much to the icon as to the apparition. Oil on sand gives their surfaces a granular density: light catches in the material, while deep blues, ochres and black passages organise an almost nocturnal field. The series is not concerned with portraiture in a descriptive sense. Instead, it constructs frontal presences, at times isolated and at times stretched to the scale of the body. Format changes the encounter. The vertical Byzantine Warriors #3 (59 × 79 cm) concentrates a face and torso within an animated surface. Byzantine Warriors #11, a horizontal 120 × 60 cm work, extends the figure across an intense blue ground. In Byzantine Warriors #9, shown in several formats including a monumental 110 × 260 cm vertical version, the character becomes a towering silhouette. From one work to the next, the series alternates closeness, distance and shifts in scale. Sand is not a decorative effect here: it gives the painting its relief, resistance and a share of its ambiguity.