Chef de Mulu

Two Faces presents the jungle as a landscape in transformation, marked by external forces and existential threats. Amid flames, abstracted vegetation and archaic tree trunks, two faces emerge: one half-visible, with an eye appearing from a trunk – the spirit of the forest that sees us, though we do not perceive it. The other face is already fading in the fire – a symbol of the decline and displacement of indigenous peoples through slash-and-burn practices and deforestation.

The few remaining tree trunks suggest a forest already largely cleared. The painting alludes to its causes: destruction of the rainforest through slash-and-burn agriculture and timber extraction, driven by Western demand and global consumption. Two Faces thus does not depict the tropical forest as an exotic idyll, but as a site of violence, transformation and loss.

Stylistically, the work combines several currents: the eruptive colours and gestural brushwork of Neo-Expressionism, the spontaneous, tachist structures that convey raw energy, and the Symbolist dimension in which forms and colours become carriers of inner states. Especially the yellow – in Asian cultural contexts closely linked with death and transience – lends the work a foreboding resonance. At the same time, echoes of Primitivism appear in the archaic treatment of faces and trunks, like totems or spirit signs pointing to a mystical, spiritual layer.

Two Faces thus oscillates between outer reality and inner vision: both a commentary on ecological destruction and cultural displacement, and a symbolic dreamscape in which the jungle itself appears as a living spirit – a realm between memory, myth and impending erasure.