Heart & system – between feeling and gears
is a painterly examination of the tension between inner feelings and external pressure. A picture about excessive demands, adaptation and the question of what remains of people when feelings are supposed to become functional.
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What remains of a person when you measure your heart in numbers?
What happens when inner experience is pressed into grids?
If empathy should be measurable.
When proximity, performance and value appear in tables.
And the heart begins to have to explain itself.
This painting was created in a moment of overwhelm.
Too many messages.
Too many requirements.
Too many metrics.
Below – almost covered –
a beating heart,
that doesn't want to be optimized,
but simply exists.
The left half of the picture:
Light, threads, pulse.
The unnameable.
That which is felt before it can be understood.
The right half of the picture:
Order, paper, structure.
What is expected
to function in systems.
In between:
a broken mirror.
Not as a symbol of destruction,
but as a sign of inner tension.
Because often we don't break down because of opposites,
but on the question:
Who am I to feel and function at the same time?
“I’m not an either/or.
I am a both/and –
torn, but real.”
— Elian M. Varek