Letter III · The exasperation of being, part 1…

To whoever has ever been startled by their own reflection,

And then the face emerged. I did not ask for it. It came distorted, almost like an illogical evolution of a drawing that refuses to grow up, yet has nothing childish about it. They are beings lying in wait for everything and everyone. Eyes that hear more than they see. Mouths sealed by hard lines. Teeth that dance at the edge of the grotesque.

I lived for years inside the theater, and perhaps that is why these faces are masks. But they are not masks that hide; they are masks that reveal what the true face would not have the courage to show. In Masks that Bite Me, they smile too wide and, deep down, every one of them bites.

My line grew more convulsive, and I began to paint in every size, from a sheet of thirteen by eighteen centimeters to a two-meter canvas. And my need for layers became almost an illness: paint over paint, contour over contour, as if I were trying to trap the energy of these beings before they escaped the canvas.

I painted faces that scream without sound, as in Echoes on the Bedroom Wall, where someone no longer knows whether they are speaking to themselves or to the wall. I painted faces not yet born, like The Voice Not Yet Born, the exact instant when the inner self asks for passage. I painted boys who dreamed of the end of the world, not as tragedy, but as the last game before everything disappears. And I painted a love as a crime committed with hands covered in frosting, in We Loved Like Someone Erasing Their Own Name.

Carnival, which in the first phase I painted as a crowd, I silenced here. Portraits of a Silent Carnival are revelers of a mute delirium, frozen in the instant of astonishment. Until I let it all pour out into Carnival of the End, one hundred and eighty by two hundred centimeters of the laughter left over when everything collapses. Sorrows dance in glitter, tragedies wear masks, traumas sing in a bloco. Laughing, for me, became survival, because crying takes breath, and there is no air left.

This is the phase in which I understood that delirium can be hot pink and have starry eyes. That the abyss also roars with laughter. And that every face I paint is a broken mirror: a possible reflection of what we are, multiple, wounded, alive.

If one of these faces seems to stare at you, do not look away. It is only doing to you what you did to it.

Marcus Yabe, Phase III, 2022 to 2024