Line to Light / 2025

ERNESTO ARTIG
Line to Light, 2025
Mixed media on canvas, 100 × 100 cm
 
How do we unlearn what we’ve been taught to embody? In Line to Light, Ernesto Artig opens a visual inquiry into masculinity as performance, inheritance, and rupture.
 
A regiment of faceless male figures moves in rigid formation across a textured field marked by symbolic imprints - eyes, hands, coded gestures. Their repetition evokes the quiet force of conformity and the emotional suppression expected of men within patriarchal systems. At the center, a vivid orange sphere disrupts the rhythm. It is both origin and rupturet, he birth of toxicity, and the moment it begins to unravel.
 
Where dominance is mistaken for leadership and empathy for weakness. Line to Light reminds us that breaking formation is no longer just personal, but urgent. This piece both mourns the cost of toxic masculinity and calls for the courage to step out of line -toward light, toward selfhood, toward change, toward humanity.