The Triumph of Defeat
The Triumph of Defeat is a critical reflection on one of the central features of contemporaneity: the systematic denial of what is dark, vulnerable and mortal. In a context marked by precarity, social fractures and material and symbolic ruins, ultra-liberal humanity resorts to a headlong flight forward—technological, consumerist and spectacular—as a mechanism of escape from fear and finitude.
Through painting, the project explores the uncomfortable territories of denial and shadow: mass graves, accidents, violated bodies, waste, landfills, victims of institutional violence, toppled effigies, fugitives, or mutant figures. The body of work forms a dossier of collapse: a visual archive of moral and material ruins that speaks to the breakdown of values, the fragility of social structures, and the erosion of human dignity.
Within this framework sits (In)refuges, a project centred on the notions of exile and uprooting, born from the remains of a former concentration camp. The work addresses memory and forgetting as forces in tension, as well as processes of annihilation of the human being—of identity and values—calling into question narratives of protection, refuge and belonging.
In The Triumph of Defeat, ruin is not the ultimate end, but a means: a way of illuminating the dark path of defeat. This defeat unfolds in two complementary dimensions. On the one hand, historical defeat—political, moral and environmental—linked to the defeated of history and to the critical readings of authors such as Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben or Pier Paolo Pasolini. On the other hand, intimate defeat, inherent to the human condition, understood as a succession of surrenders that runs through individual experience.
Far from a purely nihilistic vision, the project identifies in this defeat a sublime dimension: the celebration of the defeated as a figure embodying a radical form of courage. At the highest point of this journey appears the defeat of the ego, conceived as the final stage of the process and, at the same time, as a possible threshold towards another way of being in the world.
In a deliberate temporal distortion, post-apocalyptic scenes, ruins of the past, anticipations of future disasters and memories of historical tragedies overlap and interweave, forming a cyclical genealogy of catastrophe. At the centre of this weave stands the viewer, confronted directly with their own mortality and with the impossibility of remaining on the sidelines of what is collapsing.