The figure is running. Assembled from cut and collaged fragments of orange, yellow, and plaid-patterned shapes, it moves through the fragmented field with more momentum than any other figure in the series: the blue boots visible at the bottom, the round collaged head suggesting a face in motion rather than a mask in confrontation. The coil here is not a sphere or a tower but a chaotic scattering of abstracted forms, as if the system itself is moving, trying to keep up.
The figure is running. Assembled from cut and collaged fragments of orange, yellow, and plaid-patterned shapes, it moves through the fragmented field with more momentum than any other figure in the series: the blue boots visible at the bottom, the round collaged head suggesting a face in motion rather than a mask in confrontation. The coil here is not a sphere or a tower but a chaotic scattering of abstracted forms, as if the system itself is moving, trying to keep up.
The emojis scattered across the surface, smiley faces, X marks, circular glyphs, do more than decorative work: they introduce digital-age iconography into a field of historical violence, placing the social media surface alongside the Civil Rights symbol without mediating between them. At the bottom of the composition, beneath the yellow-and-gray construction stripes, drawn marks hold the work’s subterranean register: the Vodou inscriptions that Deceus embeds across the series to ensure the Haitian formation is materially present beneath whatever else the surface carries.
The collage construction of the figure connects this work to Henri Matisse’s late cut-outs, where bodies in motion are assembled from flat planes of cut color: the figure understood as a configuration of shapes rather than a continuous surface. Deceus’s construction is more urgent than Matisse’s, the forms less resolved, the plaid patterns carrying a cultural memory that pure color would not. The figure runs through a field that is also making it. The vèvè waits at the bottom. The emojis float above.
