"THE PLAGUE"
During the lockdowns of 2020 due to COVID-19, people around the world yearned for “third places.” This term refers to physical locations where individuals spend time between home (the “first” place) and work (the “second” place). In these third places, people exchange ideas and build relationships. Parks, recreation centers, hair salons, gyms, and fast-food restaurants are all examples of third places.
Over a century ago, similar spaces became the subject of painting as Europe enjoyed the benefits of the Post-Industrial Revolution. In particular, the transformation of Paris during the late 19th century catalyzed the Impressionist movement. Impressionist artists captured the rampant prosperity and social change in scenes of places where people gathered and enjoyed life together. These public sites ranged from boulevards, avenues, and parks to café concerts, theaters, and bars.
For this body of work, I used both celebrated and lesser-known Impressionist paintings as starting points. I am not channeling the Impressionist aesthetic of depicting light and fleeting moments but rather using their compositions to visually comment on contemporary third spaces. Furthermore, instead of attempting to emulate the trademark brushstrokes of Monet, Van Gogh, Renoir, or Seurat, I employed a layered and detailed painting style reminiscent of children’s book illustrations. However, while I am not depicting cute bunnies in idyllic settings, my third spaces are inhabited by rats.
Traditionally, rats symbolize negative things, often associated with the transmission of deadly diseases. They played a role in the Black Death, which killed millions in Europe in the 14th century, and in the decimation of Indigenous tribes in the Northeastern United States following the arrival of foreign colonizers in the 16th century. In Albert Camus’s novel The Plague, rats are the first to die, their deaths foreshadowing the human casualties of the epidemic in the Algerian city of Oran. In both fiction and reality, pandemics strike indiscriminately, regardless of social status, age, race, or gender. Humanity is constantly vulnerable to annihilation by deadly microorganisms or by its own actions. At its core, human existence teeters on what Camus termed "the absurd."
Visually, my paintings embrace a surreal absurdity by depicting rat-people in everyday public environments. On a deeper level, my work explores a philosophical absurdity by portraying characters who behave in ways that contradict the very essence of third spaces—places meant for community building. Particularly after the COVID-19 lockdowns, it would be absurd if we had learned nothing about the fragility of human existence and our environment. As we adapt to a new normal and return to third spaces, one might hope that people would behave differently. However, this is a tall order because no one is immune to the absurd. It is intrinsic to our human nature to repeat the mistakes of the past, perpetuate isolationist patterns, and maintain a sense of entitlement. In this sense, we are the ultimate plague, destroying the planet and everything on it.