How Many Times?

The question is not rhetorical. It is the rhythm of the work itself — the repeated gesture, the accumulated difference, the slow wearing-away that is also a building-up. How many times must one draw the same head before it becomes something else? How many times can a back be turned before a portrait becomes a landscape? Dozens of framed charcoal heads, the back of a head rendered again and again, each slightly different, each bearing the marks of its own making and unmaking: hung across a corner wall in a Goa interior, in a denser grid formation on a white wall, and once in the aerial roots of a banyan at night.

To draw the back of a head is to refuse the face. The refusal is not hostile — it is simply the condition of being: occupying space without claiming it, presence as residue. The viewer who approaches expecting to read a face, to understand a subject, to know a person, is met instead with the curve of a skull, the texture of hair, the fold of an ear. Surfaces without depths, presences without disclosures. Against the long demand that the other be transparent, legible, catalogued, these heads hold to what a philosophy from the Caribbean calls the right to opacity: you may look, but you may not know.

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