“The face is not what it shows, but what it withholds. It is the image of desire and the map of absence.”

a note found in the artist’s studio

There is something in the faces of Imago Altera that resists clarity. That withdraws, that unsettles. Faces that seem to emerge from a perceptual fog, from a deep layer of visual memory, yet dissolve the moment we try to define them. They are not portraits, not masks, not fixed identities. They are apparitions. Traces. Shadows gazing at us from within the fractured mirror of our time.

In a present dominated by forced visibility, RedRum reverses the logic. If the face has become a digital currency, a social signature, a constant showcase, the artist instead gives us a face that cannot be sold, archived, or reassured. A face that fractures, trembles, reflects not what we are, but what we fear we might become.

These figures are not “posing.” There is no frontal presentation, no narcissistic exposure. On the contrary: each work is an escape from recognition. A psychological landslide. It’s as if the image had passed through a magnetic field, what remains is a spectral imprint, an interference, a threshold.

RedRum works on the face the way one works on trauma: not by trying to represent it, but by allowing it to act upon the image surface. These works do not speak “about” identity; they unravel it. In Imago Altera, identity is not something to be discovered, but a field of forces, a process in flux. Each face is an open terrain, a silent struggle between being and appearing.

This is not an aesthetic of fragmentation for its own sake. RedRum constructs each composition as a tension: between form and dissolution, between symmetry and fracture, between the desire to be seen and the fear of truly being seen. What emerges is an aesthetic of unease, where the face loses centrality and becomes landscape, an inner, emotional, distorted landscape.

One can sense the influence of a painterly tradition that stretches from Francis Bacon to Jenny Saville, but filtered through a digitally native visuality: after all, RedRum is an artist of our time, and his time is one of multiplication, algorithmic alteration, images that never stop generating. The face, then, is no longer representation: it is process, glitch, symptom.

Looking at Imago Altera is not easy. There’s nothing to “understand,” no symbols to decode. The experience is closer to a near encounter with something about to happen, but that never fully does. The figures seem as if they are about to speak, yet remain mute. It is a silence that weighs, that pulses. A silence that seems to ask us: are you sure you want to know who you are, when you truly look?

In these works, the face becomes a threshold, a gap between worlds. And like all thresholds, what matters is not the crossing, but the dwelling in the moment before. RedRum dares to remain in that space — where the face unravels but has not yet become something else. That is where the collection’s visual power is born: in this “no longer” and “not yet” that destabilizes and captivates.

The title Imago Altera evokes the notion of the double, but not in the classic sense of a twin or mirrored reflection. Here, the double is an unsettling, elusive figure. Not a copy of the self, but its disturbance. The face RedRum offers is not “the other” beside the self, but the other within: that which lies beyond control, which stirs in the shadows.

There is something deeply psychoanalytic at work here. But it’s not a textbook quotation of Freud or Lacan, it’s a mode of sensing, of letting the image be inhabited by what has been repressed. The face as a dense container, never fully emptied. Each work holds the memory of what was excluded: withheld emotions, unspoken versions of the self, buried desires. The double is not a faithful mirror but a loaded interference: who might you have been, if you hadn’t become who you are?

In an art world obsessed with clarity, identifiability, personal storytelling, RedRum makes a radical move: he dismantles. He shatters the surface. He breaks coherence. And he does so without self-indulgence, without aestheticizing fracture. There is no gratuitous drama, no performative darkness. There is only a lucid, acidic gaze that turns to the face and says: you are no longer a refuge.

And it is precisely in that loss of refuge that these works find their strength. They force us to dwell in the void, the undefined, the unresolved. They compel us to recognize that identity is not something to exhibit, but a mystery to traverse. Not a truth to affirm, but a wound to inhabit.

In Imago Altera, the face shatters. But in doing so, it opens up the possibility of a new vision. A vision that is uncomfortable, complex, necessary.

A vision in which, finally, we stop looking to be recognized, and begin to look in order to unlearn who we thought we were.