Portal, 2021

16" x 20" acrylic on board; Basic Frame

In Portal, the human figure becomes both monument and threshold. Its body of cracked stone conveys endurance, fragility, and the inevitability of decay. From the breakage of flesh and mineral, a tangled, lifeless plant grows upward, refusing the natural order of blooming toward renewal. Instead of a head or face, a cube of stone emerges—a vessel of geometry and containment, austere against the organic entanglement that supports it.

Inside this box, paradox opens. The viewer finds not darkness but a miniature chamber of stark simplicity: a bare room with a single door, ajar, revealing an impossible expanse of pure white light. This light is the painting’s center, a rupture in the eternal cloudy night that envelops the figure. It is a symbol of transcendence, possibility, and mystery—the glimpse of a beyond that resists naming.

The composition compels the viewer to confront the contrast between confinement and infinite openness. The figure is at once a ruin of human materiality and a vessel for revelation. Portal asks whether our limitations—our fractured bodies, our entanglements with the lifeless and the broken—can themselves become the thresholds to illumination.

Reverse: Shattered visage.