To long for something is to already half-possess it. These are portraits of that half. Each work in this series is named for a word that has no clean translation: Surur, Farhat, Sukun, Mahboob, Premi. I have always been drawn to faces that hold something back. This series began as a study in restraint — what a portrait reveals when it refuses to explain itself, what remains when everything unnecessary is stripped away. The subjects do not perform. They simply exist, in the way that memory exists: vivid, incomplete, and entirely present.

 

Twelve portraits. Twelve words for feelings that resist translation. Painted on canvas in the tradition of intimate portraiture, this series marks the close of a sustained inquiry into desire, memory, and the faces we carry with us long after we let go.

 

The series is now complete.

XII/XII - Sonya