Protest. Triptych

In the upper half of the canvas a flaming bottle hurtles through a black sky trailing sparks, beside a numbered list of names and birth years inscribed in red, its last line reading a brand of beer. Below, a tightly packed crowd of distorted heads presses upward, mouths open in shouting or prayer, wrapped in kerchiefs, caps and hoods, one raised hand pointing skyward.

Thick, sculptural strokes of flesh tone, ochre and blue-gray build the crowd against an enveloping black ground, while the fire is rendered in hot streaks of orange and yellow. Faces are compressed and distorted into a dense mass, and the raw handling paired with the deadpan inscribed list gives the scene a tense, satirical charge.