A Line Through Every Heart

A Line Through Every Heart is an ongoing series of large-scale oil portrait paintings of real historical figures, drawn from the defining episodes of mass violence of the 20th and early 21st centuries: the Holocaust, the Bosnian war, the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Anfal campaign against the Kurds, the genocide in Darfur, and the long arc of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It places perpetrators, resisters, witnesses, and morally ambiguous figures within one frame. It does not equate them. It holds them in proximity and asks what separated one from another, and whether that separation was ever as clean as we like to believe.

The work develops in two stages: individual paintings entered into international exhibitions as they are completed, then a final exhibition that brings the body of work together. It is accompanied by an essay, The Deep Image, which is part of the work.

The work

A photograph is not empty. A great one holds the whole of a person in a fraction of a second, the fear, the cruelty, the ordinariness, caught and fixed, often more than a sitter would ever give a painter. The painting does not rescue the face from neutrality. It does something slower. The photograph is taken; the painting is made, over months, every mark a decision, the painter living with this face far longer than anyone would choose, a murderer’s or a child’s. The instant becomes a long looking, and no one looks at a face that long without being implicated by it.

The method is photorealist, worked through the dark and light of Caravaggio and Rembrandt, and the position of each painting is not set in advance. It is found at the easel, in the making. What the work refuses, throughout, is to signal villainy. The perpetrator is given the same human depth as anyone, so that what meets the viewer is not a monster lit for the part but a face they recognise, and their own response, the pull, even the kinship, before they reach the label. The horror is not in the picture. It is in what they felt.

At this scale, in oil, the face is no longer a document held at arm’s length or scrolled past on a screen. It is larger than you. You stand under it, and it will not be dismissed.

Curatorial position

We keep a comfortable distance from history. We look at the faces of perpetrators and feel certain the line between them and us is fixed, biological, settled. This exhibition removes that distance.

The line Solzhenitsyn described is not something observed in other people, in other countries, in other decades. It runs through the person standing in front of the canvas. It ran through the figure on it first.

Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?

The work offers no resolution and takes no political side. Paint a perpetrator as good or evil and you flatten a person into a moral type, strip the history and the politics out of what they did, and hand the viewer a position that feels righteous and explains nothing. Mahmood Mamdani made this case about Darfur: reduced to perpetrator against victim, Arab against African, a conflict loses its history and becomes a morality play. The work refuses that. They acted inside real conditions, colonial borders, drought, ideology, weaponry, fear, the machinery of states, and the paintings hold the face and the history in the same frame.

It asks the viewer to sit with a harder truth: that atrocity is most often the work of ordinary people inside systems that make it ordinary, and that moral courage, when it appears, tends to come from people who had every reason to look away and did not.

Placing the Holocaust beside Cambodia, Bosnia, and Darfur takes a side in an old argument, between those who hold each genocide as singular and those who read them as one continuum. The position here follows Shimon Samuels: each case specific in itself, and each a signpost along one continuum of horror.

The essay

The exhibition is accompanied by an essay, The Deep Image, part of the work and set beside the paintings rather than behind them. It follows a single mechanism: the same seizure that produces art can, swept through a crowd and given an enemy, produces atrocity, and what separates the maker from the murderer is not the proclivity but what moves the hand. The full argument is the companion text.