Serve The Man (2024)

Serve the Man confronts the aesthetics of obedience, sacrifice, and consumption through a darkly regal portrait. A woman, dressed in fine Baroque attire, offers a platter bearing a decaying, tar-drenched head. Her gaze is steady and knowing, as though fully aware of the performance she’s part of.

⤷ The painting plays with the language of aristocratic portraiture — posture, poise, and the silent theatre of submission. Yet what she offers is not fruit, not bounty, but the residue of servitude. The act of “serving” becomes literal, grotesque, and cyclical.

The background’s dim ochres and dying branches collapse the illusion of grandeur, exposing rot beneath ceremony. The woman’s expression sits somewhere between defiance and exhaustion; she has fulfilled her duty, and in doing so, perhaps destroyed herself. Her collar frames her like a halo or a noose.

The title invites dual interpretation: to “serve the man” as command and as indictment. Who is the man? A god? A husband? A system? The question remains intentionally unanswered.

Within The Damnation Project, this piece functions as a critique of ritualised patriarchy — the ways women have been aestheticised as both vessels and punishments, saints and spectacles.