In Echoes of Self, 1dontknows builds a visual liturgy from disintegrated memory. His portraits aren’t depictions, they’re presences. Haunting figures wrapped in silence, immersed in spaces that feel both sacred and suspended. Time here does not flow, it lingers. Each image is a visual fracture that resists resolution, an offering made not to the eye, but to the unconscious.

In these works, identity becomes a ritual, not a fixed image, but a repeated gesture of becoming. What remains when the face fades? What gestures survive when the self is no longer coherent?

The language that emerges is not symbolic in the classical sense, it is pre-verbal, elemental. Keys, skulls, shrouds, hollowed eyes. Like fragments of a forgotten liturgy, these elements echo the sacred without anchoring to any known belief. This liminal aesthetic recalls the early metaphysical investigations of Giorgio de Chirico, especially The Seer (1915), where the human form becomes vessel and cipher, haunted by its own silence.

But 1dontknows doesn’t stage drama, he stages stillness. A stillness that vibrates with internal motion. These figures do not act, they await. Not in stasis, but in suspension. There is a cinematic quality in their halted gestures, but one that owes more to the disquiet of Andrei Tarkovsky than to narrative cinema. Time doesn’t flow in Echoes of Self. It hovers.

The influence of religious painting is evident, but it is not reverent. The compositions borrow from Marian iconography, from the devotional gaze of saints and oracles, but the sacred has been stripped of doctrine. In its place remains the gesture: the downward glance, the folded hands, the exposed wound. As in Francis Picabia’s Portrait d'une jeune fille américaine dans l'état de nudité (1915), figuration is reduced to suggestion, and suggestion to psychic residue.

The hybrid quality of 1dontknows’ aesthetic, part collage, part classical, gives the work a tension that feels both ancient and digital. His practice doesn’t quote the past; it consumes it, reconfigures it, and exhales it as something unnameable. Like Ana Mendieta's Silueta Series, his work transforms the body into site: of memory, of violence, of erasure.

And yet, despite the apparent darkness, Echoes of Self is not a mourning space, it is a space of listening. What 1dontknows achieves is a suspension of explanation. He does not ask to be understood. He invites the viewer to enter the silence. To become complicit in the unspeakable.

This is particularly evident in the treatment of the face. Repeatedly obscured, multiplied, melted or erased, the face here is not a site of identity but of dissolution. Like in Francis Bacon’s Portrait of George Dyer in a Mirror (1968), the subject is caught in a loop of becoming and undoing, never fully forming, never fully disappearing.

The palette, rich with deep shadows, bruised flesh tones, ochres and muted reds, evokes a baroque sensibility twisted through the surreal. It’s as if Caravaggio had painted for a world after the collapse of language. The chiaroscuro is not theatrical; it is intimate. The darkness doesn’t hide violence, it reveals it, slowly, as a whisper.

Throughout the series, the presence of ritual is inescapable. Not in its literal symbols, but in the repetition of gesture, of gaze, of concealment. Echoes of Self becomes a devotional act, not toward any god or doctrine, but toward that fragile, flickering self that survives even the most violent abstraction.

The final impression is not one of despair, but of intimacy. These works do not scream. They hum. They tremble. They echo. Like the lovers in Egon Schiele’s Death and the Maiden (1915), the figures in Echoes of Self cling not to love, but to dissolution. What joins them is not sentiment, but disappearance.

1dontknows offers us a vision of identity stripped of language and certainty. A vision where memory no longer holds form, and where the self, fragmented, silenced, sanctified, continues to flicker.

Not as presence, but as echo.