What Did You Expect? (2025)

What Did You Expect is an unflinching portrait of consequence. The figure, poised in chiaroscuro light, seems to confront the viewer directly, her expression caught between accusation and exhaustion. Black resinous veins coil around her arms and throat, seeping into the cracks of her skin and stitching her mouth in silence. Yet her eyes, dark, lucid, unyielding, speak volumes.

⤷ In The Damnation Project, this piece operates as a mirror. It asks not what has been done to her, but what we, the onlookers, have allowed to happen. The title is a weapon: rhetorical, bitter, and self-reflective. It implies complicity, the audience’s gaze tangled in the violence of beauty and the spectacle of suffering.

The painting draws on Baroque portraiture’s language of reverence but poisons it from within. The figure’s hand, partially lifted as if mid-blessing or mid-curse, is coated in a black substance that might be oil, blood, or something more infernal. It drips down in slow, deliberate ruin. The soft folds of her garments, painted in subdued crimsons and ochres, anchor her in historical realism, while the tendrils transform her into something post-human, both martyr and monster.

Her half-sealed lips recall the archetype of the silenced woman, but there’s defiance in the tilt of her head. She has seen the rot beneath the rituals, the sickness in devotion. The black veins don’t merely invade her—they emanate from her, suggesting transformation rather than defeat.

What Did You Expect stands as both accusation and elegy. It’s a portrait of reclamation through corruption, where decay becomes expression and silence becomes a language of its own.