False Salvator Mundi began as a monumental hyperreal portrait built to produce visual certainty. I first painted the figure and face in full, using the precision of realism to construct a presence that felt immediate and believable. Then I intervened at the point where identity is most readily recognized: the face.
I physically scratched the painted portrait from the surface. The removed paint was not discarded. I collected it and preserved it in a glass jar. In practical terms, the portrait still exists, but no longer where a portrait is expected to exist. It has been displaced from image into object, from representation into residue, from appearance into a material archive.
The altered face was then overwritten with painted pseudo-code organized around layers of identity, body, behavior and social visibility. Its language resembles systems that classify, score, optimize and standardize a person. What began as a singular human presence is transformed into a field of categories and values.
The work therefore does not treat erasure as simple disappearance. The face is absent from the image yet materially present outside it. Hyperrealism first establishes trust; the physical removal of the portrait breaks that trust; the coded surface replaces recognition with classification.
For me, False Salvator Mundi asks what remains of identity when the image through which we recognize it is removed, measured and rewritten.
The portrait was not simply erased. It was displaced from the image into matter.
