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The Stranglehold (2025)
Oil on canvas, 40 × 40 cm

In “The Stranglehold”, a compact 40 × 40 cm oil painting, the world is reduced to a tension point: a fragile zone of life squeezed between two forms of destruction. On one side, the grey, angular rigidity of cement and asphalt; on the other, the black, devouring presence of fire. The work is not an illustration of catastrophe, but a diagram of pressure – a visual map of how environmental collapse is produced, section by section, decision by decision.

A fractured landscape under pressure

The centre of the painting is an explosion of green, yellow and teal triangles, folding and colliding like shards of a shattered terrain. They suggest hills, fields, forests, and all the residual spaces where life still insists on existing. Within some of these triangles, tiny patterns appear: dots, waves, short lines, almost like the memory of leaves, seeds, microbial forms. These micro-motifs evoke biodiversity – the invisible complexity that sustains an ecosystem and that urban planning so often flattens into simple surfaces on a map.

This living core is not peaceful; it is restless and fragmented. There are no soft contours, no organic curves. Everything is fractured, as if the land has already been cut into plots, parcels, and zones of exploitation. Even before the intervention of concrete and fire, the green area shows the marks of division and negotiation. Nature, here, is already a contested territory.

Cement as a slow suffocation

In the upper-right section, the palette shifts abruptly to greys, whites, and muted tones. Polygonal shapes resemble blocks of buildings, slabs, highway interchanges, or parking lots seen from above. White dashed lines echo road markings, junctions, and borders – the typical cartographic language of human infrastructure.

These grey forms are not neutral; they lean into the green zone, cutting across it, tilting and overlapping like a set of heavy plates sliding over a softer material. One shape contains a stylised window; another, a web-like structure. Together, they suggest both the promise and the trap of urbanisation: shelter, connectivity, networks – but also confinement, enclosure, and surveillance.

Rather than depicting skyscrapers or recognisable cityscapes, the painting chooses a schematic language closer to maps, plans, and diagrams. Cementification appears not just as built form, but as planning logic: the idea that land is primarily a surface to be subdivided, paved, optimised and monetised. The “stranglehold” is not simply the presence of concrete, but the mindset that allows it to spread.

Fire as abrupt catastrophe

At the lower left, a deep black area opens like a void, edged by a jagged band of intense red. This zone reads immediately as burnt land, the aftermath of a wildfire or the mouth of a chasm created by collapse. The red contour is sharp, almost graphic – a warning sign more than a natural phenomenon. Fire, here, is not romantic or cleansing; it is a blunt, irreversible cut.

The black surface has a different visual weight than the greys of the cement area. Where the grey sector is congested with internal lines and shapes, the black zone is almost mute – a place where information has been erased. If the concrete side represents over-writing the landscape with human order, the burnt side represents wiping it out entirely. Between these two extremes, the green field is trapped.

The diagonal of siege

Compositionally, “The Stranglehold” is organised around a strong diagonal tension. The green, fragile ecosystem runs diagonally between the oppressive grey concrete in the upper right and the black void of fire in the lower left. This creates a sense of compression: the eye feels that the green zone is being closed in, pushed from both directions.

The diagonal also introduces a temporal dimension. The viewer can read it as a sequence:

• from the vibrant but already fractured greens,

• to the red border of danger,

• into the black aftermath of destruction.
  
  

Or, in another direction:

• from the fragile green,

• up into the grey architecture of control,

• where life is gradually replaced by regulated, hard-edged surfaces.
  
  

Either way, the painting resists a stable, safe centre. There is no neutral middle ground; everything is in process, shifting toward damage.

A cartography of the Anthropocene

One of the most striking aspects of the work is how it operates like a map of the Anthropocene. Rather than depicting a specific location, “The Stranglehold” functions as a condensed diagram of global processes: deforestation, suburban sprawl, speculative real-estate development, climate-driven wildfires.

The proliferation of polygons recalls satellite images and GIS maps, where complex terrains are reduced to coloured sections, each representing a different “use” – agricultural, residential, industrial, protected. This visual language suggests that what we often call “nature” is already filtered through administrative categories and economic interests. The painting appropriates that same language but turns it into a critique. The map is no longer a tool of control; it becomes evidence in an indictment.

The title underlines this: a “stranglehold” is both a physical grip and a power strategy. Here, the grip is exerted by cement and fire, but behind them we can sense policies, markets, negligence, and denial. The painting refuses the comforting narrative of “natural disaster” and instead points to systemic responsibility.

Between abstraction and accusation

Formally, the work sits in a productive tension between geometric abstraction and political accusation. It does not rely on slogans, text, or recognisable symbols like factories or smokestacks. Yet its message is far from ambiguous. Colour and form are enough to carry the urgency.

The green triangles, for example, could be enjoyed purely as an abstract rhythm of shapes; but once we understand them as fragments of a threatened ecosystem, their liveliness takes on a tragic undertone. Each triangle looks precarious, as if one more push from the grey blocks or the advancing black would cause the whole structure to collapse.

In this sense, “The Stranglehold” aligns with a strand of contemporary eco-art that uses abstraction as a critical tool. Instead of illustrating specific events (a particular wildfire, a specific city), it condenses patterns and dynamics. The viewer is invited not only to feel empathy for a destroyed landscape, but to recognise the logic that leads to that destruction.

A painted essay on crisis

Viewed within your broader practice, the painting also reads as a form of “thinking in paint”. Each segment, line, and collision of colour operates like a sentence in a visual essay on environmental crisis. The canvas becomes a page where the argument is not linear but spatial: multiple pressures, contradictions and temporalities overlap at once.

“The Stranglehold” does not offer a solution; it refuses the illusion that a simple act of “awareness” could undo the damage. Instead, it insists on showing the mechanism: how cementification and fires, slow suffocation and sudden catastrophe, work together to erode the conditions of life. The painting’s power lies in this honesty. It does not ask the viewer to contemplate beauty in the traditional sense, but to confront a structure of violence that is already embedded in our daily environment.

In the end, what remains open is a question: if this is the map of where we are, is there still a path out of the stranglehold? The canvas does not answer, but it refuses to let us look away.

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