Letter IV · The exasperation of being, part 2: what remained after the collapse

To whoever has made it this far,

At some point my fear of transgression came to an end. I cannot name the day. I know that, suddenly, chaos stopped asking permission and settled into every brushstroke, into every layer I laid down. This is the phase in which my exasperation reaches its highest point, like an apocalypse in which social decompensation happens on the canvas, in the line and in the energy of the figures.

Here time stopped being a line for me. I began some of these works years ago and only now felt compelled to deliver the last stroke, the last cry. Mirrors that Do Not Reflect, two meters wide, is one of them: two faces side by side that do not look at each other, fused in confused greens. The reflection, there, does not reveal. It dissolves.

Now I paint the face as anatomy. In Vascular Carnival, it smiles with every nerve, made of arteries and confetti: a parade inside the skin. In Burning Laughter, flames lick the face and it smiles, not out of courage, but out of habit, with horns that are a crown. In my painting, joy stopped being a disguise and became a defense, sometimes revenge.

I began to give names that do not exist. Familexas, Milicexas, Ninexas, Caotibkismo. They are not words, they are passwords to the colorful madness that keeps us standing. In Milicexas, in military tones, I drew a genealogy of control and fear, a caricature of power that is dangerously familiar. It is the scream against the authority that pretends to protect. In Ninexas, nine faces are nine variations of a single collapse, and the line never closes: the contour always leaks.

And then the support rebelled as well. I painted on printed adhesive, on synthetic leather, on my own face. In Selficonexa, I enter the creature: the real portrait blends into delirium, and art stops representing in order to devour. In Iconexa, a classical, serene face holds out at the center while the world collapses around it, venerated and profaned at once. In The Tote, a bag becomes an urban reliquary, the tattooed skin of a time in collapse, carrying the world and whoever got lost inside it.

In the midst of all this, I wrote a graphic letter: Pauta Amor. Between crossed-out words and wide-open eyes, a silent plea. Perhaps it is the synthesis of everything I have made so far: to love is to bear the confusion, and to turn it into art.

This phase has not ended. I condensed it; I did not close it. I keep seeking aesthetic subversion, in other materials and in other sizes, because what moves me was never a style. It was a desire: the desire of being.

Because this is not just painting. It is survival. It is rite. It is flame. It is what remained after the collapse.

Whoever looks, let them feel. Whoever feels, let them carry. And whoever carries, let them transform.

Marcus Yabe, Phase IV, 2021 to 2025