Breaking Before Nietzsche's God

The title references Nietzsche’s ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ where he speaks of two dynamic forces in human action. One for camouflaging, making beautiful, ornamental, and intelligible – that he named ‘Apollonian’ – the subconscious, barely knowable, ‘sublime’, awe-inspiring and frightening ‘truth’, called the ‘Dionysian’.

I’ve threaded fake pearls into the surface, questioning the wisdoms we collect, disrupting and being continuous with the surface of the painting and its themes. The subconscious is mapped, as per romantic tradition, in spontaneous forms, and the whole effect is one of campy seriousness.