The Faceless

“The Faceless” represents the people war leaves behind without identity, recognition or memory. The civilians inside collapsed apartments, the families inside villages nobody can pronounce, the children carried away before anyone learns their names. They disappear into statistics, reports and satellite images while the world continues moving forward.

During operations you sometimes pass through places only minutes after impact. Smoke still hanging in the streets. People searching through concrete with their hands because equipment never arrived. Faces covered in dust until nobody can distinguish one person from another anymore. That is where the title comes from.

This painting is not about politics, strategy or victory. It is about the reality that many who suffer most during conflict will never be known outside the people standing next to them in that exact moment. Some may have been innocent. Some may have protected others. Some may have died trying to hold their families together while everything around them collapsed.

The faceless are not invisible because they were unimportant. They become faceless because the world is unable to carry the weight of every story at once. With this work I give those unseen men, women and children, from both sides of the fight, a place, even if history never will.

Created on canvas using acrylic paint applied with a Glock magazine, an embassy access card and a block of melted copper made from Kalashnikov bullets. I use real operational materials to leave something of myself behind in the canvas to give the art a soul.

Dimension 50 X 40 cm on canvas