There is a silence that precedes every face, a moment before recognition when the human form becomes something else, something suspended between being and meaning. Cursed Tribe, the latest collection by Blotter, lives entirely within that threshold. It is a world where identity ceases to be a mirror and becomes a prison, a ritual mechanism designed to contain what cannot be controlled.

Fifty portraits, fifty variations of the same affliction: the struggle to hold oneself together.

Blotter has always been an artist of transformation. His early works carried a lighter, almost playful sensibility, a visual language rooted in collage, motion, and a digital poetics of spontaneity. But beneath that apparent simplicity, a slow gravitation was taking place. What began as a love for “something pretty and sweet,” as he once described, has evolved into something severe, ascetic, and symbolic. Cursed Tribe marks the culmination of this shift: a body of work that rejects ease and searches for truth in tension.

Each image in Cursed Tribe presents a member of a forgotten lineage, beings whose names have been replaced by their ailments, whose souls are catalogued by the nature of their curse. Curse of Primal Rage. Curse of the Piercing Gaze. Curse of the Silent Lament. These are not poetic inventions, but diagnoses: attempts to map invisible disorders, to give form to psychic pain.

The tribe is not united by culture or geography, but by suffering, by the shared burden of repression. They are, in essence, us.

The visual language of the collection is stripped to its bones: black, white, and blood. This triad functions as a spiritual code. Black delineates containment, the void that defines boundaries. White marks absence, purity, the surface of control. And red, that sharp, visceral crimson, is the only trace of life that refuses suppression. It seeps through cracks, drips from wounds, stains the mask from within.

In Blotter’s vision, color itself becomes emotion distilled, a visual scream reduced to a whisper.

The mask, in Cursed Tribe, is not symbolic, it is structural. It functions as both protection and confinement, as both the wound and the bandage. Horns, stitches, sigils, thorns, every element is functional, not decorative. Each is part of a private exorcism, a design of psychic architecture built to contain the storm of the self.

These are not masks meant to deceive. They do not hide; they hold. They are diagrams of survival, external mechanisms for internal warfare.

Through this discipline of form, Blotter touches a long lineage that spans from tribal ritual to modern psychology, from the ceremonial masks of ancient cultures to the invisible ones we wear daily. In these portraits, myth and neurosis converge. The sacred becomes clinical; the spiritual becomes diagnostic.

The Cursed Tribe is thus a pantheon of archetypes reimagined for a digital age, figures suspended between religion and code, human and avatar, body and interface.

Although born in pixels, Cursed Tribe carries the gravitas of something ancient. Its compositional severity, centralized figures, neutral voids, symmetrical tension, recalls early iconography and religious portraiture. Each work isolates its subject like a relic under glass, stripped of context, stripped of time.

This formal austerity generates an atmosphere of ritual: every portrait feels like an invocation, an act of containment performed before the viewer.

Blotter’s technique, however, remains unmistakably contemporary. His command of digital texture and artificial composition does not attempt to imitate tradition, it builds a new one. The smooth gradients and synthetic precision of his imagery are not aesthetic choices but philosophical ones: they speak to the hypercontrolled reality of our time, where emotion is filtered, expression mediated, and authenticity masked by performance.

In this sense, Cursed Tribe can be read as a reflection on digital existence itself. The online self, curated, coded, endlessly surveilled, mirrors the same dynamic of suppression and control. Each “mask” we construct in virtual space functions as both identity and imprisonment, expression and denial. Blotter’s tribe, though fictional, inhabits the same psychic architecture as the users behind screens, the same tension between visibility and vulnerability.

The power of Cursed Tribe lies in its refusal of empathy. These portraits do not ask to be understood or redeemed. They demand to be faced.

Centered, frontal, stripped of narrative or background, each figure asserts a gaze that destabilizes the viewer’s comfort. To look at them is to meet one’s own reflection in its most disciplined form, to confront the machinery that keeps our chaos contained.

Blotter’s portraits turn the act of viewing into an act of endurance.

Through this confrontation, the artist reclaims portraiture as a space of truth rather than likeness. The mask becomes the new face, the only one capable of telling what the human expression cannot. What was once hidden becomes visible, not in clarity, but in structure. The mask reveals by concealing.

In its silence, Cursed Tribe speaks of universality. Each curse is personal, but the act of containment is collective. We all wear masks of some kind, social, emotional, digital, moral. We build architectures of control around our impulses, our grief, our rage, our love. We hide our chaos behind acceptable forms, and call it identity.

Blotter’s work exposes this illusion not through critique, but through ritual: it invites us to witness what it means to be human in an age of containment.

Behind every portrait lies a mirror. Behind every mask, a reflection.

And perhaps that is Blotter’s final gesture, to remind us that the tribe we are looking at is not cursed by gods or demons, but by ourselves. The curse is consciousness; the mask, survival. The tribe is the world.