Erosion — Three Solfeggio Reports

In none of the three is there visible violence. Nobody shouts, nobody raises a hand, nobody is taken away. Everything is calm, orderly, well dressed. What you are looking at is not the moment of the wrong: it is the moment after, when everyone is already behaving well.

In all three the real subject is the gaze. The mother looks elsewhere. The square sleeps while the balcony applauds without seeing. The town has closed its eyes, and the only one left awake is counted rather than recognised.

The injustice is not a single event. It is a habit of not looking, so widely shared that it has become good manners.

Surrealism, here, is a way past the reasonable eye. One thing out of place — a dog where a child should be, a tree flowering exactly where the poison lands, a single face in a street of people without one — and the unconscious sees what consciousness had already filed as normal.

Each work carries one frequency from the Solfeggio scale, turned against its promise of healing. 639 Hz, sold as the frequency of connection, for a household where affection has been distributed correctly. 396 Hz, which releases guilt, for a square where guilt has been thinned until nobody carries any. 852 Hz, which awakens the inner eye, for someone who has been seen very clearly by something with no intention of looking after them. The tone runs unbroken beneath each composition, present in every frame, without fade or interruption. It is what the picture will not admit.

The smallest details explain nothing. A brass plaque, a house number, three stencilled digits: only someone who comes close finds them. That is what each work asks of the person looking — to do the thing that nobody inside the picture is doing.