Male Ego

Male Ego, Acrylic on canvas 55 x 46 2001

Here is the woman in an agony of colors, stars, American flags, and she herself seems to be in a posture of sexual devastation. Her face is difficult to read, somewhere between as if she were turning away or the face of pleasure. She is caught in the radiance of colors. The reflection of another body is beneath her, as if subjected to a national examination with the colors of America around her. Her naked body is at the center of this extraordinary painting in which colors seem to radiate out from her in a subtle and energetic way. It is not as if she is dissolving into the background. Rather, it’s as if she were in the process of being assaulted by so many colors. It connotes the story of the rape of the Sabine women, the idiocy and cruelty of humanity, a national crime. Her figure in a tragic pose familiar to the Greeks. If the male ego is something collective, then it converges here to torture a woman in a burst of national colors.