The Mask of Kindness — The Ambiguity of Perpetration
Perpetration is not an identity but a configuration.
It operates beyond intent, dismantling the binary of violence and non-violence.
It is a residual formation of affective power structured through social hierarchy.
This configuration refuses the dichotomy of speech and silence, empathy and inaction.
Every emotion can be moralized.
Every morality can obscure or institutionalize harm.
Kindness is consumed as a synonym for aesthetic stability.
Yet within the image, it functions as a regulatory device
that enforces ethical paralysis and visual passivity.
The image is no longer an object of appreciation.
It becomes a mechanism that defers ethical judgment,
and simultaneously an alibi that depoliticizes the narrative of harm.
This work does not follow the grammar of the system.
It subtly disrupts its order.
Landscape is not a representation but a staged evasion.
The figure is not a subject but a residual tactic of signification.
Animals are not devices for human projection.
They are reiterations of decontextualized morality,
conduits of ethical neutrality that reject emotional instruction.
Painting here does not narrate.
2025,
from The Ambiguity
of the Perpetrator
Deconstruction
of Form
It displaces structure into latent discomfort,
and converts the interior of the image into a site of unreadable silence.
The viewer stops reading, suspends interpretation,
and finds their moral reflex drawn into a position of aesthetic complicity.
Perpetration, then, is not a psychological deviation,
but an affective configuration rationalized and reproduced within institutional systems—
ethics rendered operational through education, care, and cultural policy.
Painting does not reproduce the language of institutional ethics.
It reveals what that language conceals,
what it codifies,
and what it absolves from the charge of harm.
Ultimately,
the viewer is presented with their own possible position within this unconscious chain of language.
Appreciation is not feeling.
Appreciation is a system.
The viewer, in the act of interpretation, becomes part of the communal gaze that constitutes harm itself.
This work does not expose.
Instead,
it articulates—through the structure of silence,
how fragile, how ordinary,
and how effortlessly moralized the concept of perpetration can become.