Dragons presents itself as a kind of festival—though what is being marked is not pleasure so much as a temporary suspension of whatever ordinarily allows a person to be recognised as human. There is something bacchanalian in its looseness, yet the organising principle is not excess but permission: permission to look, to remain, to accept without protest. The atmosphere is one of sanctioned attendance rather than participation, a gathering whose terms are never fully stated but are quickly understood.

One views this work as one has learned to view such works, already provisioned with feeling. A post-contemporary viewer arrives expecting that affect will be required of them, that a response will be drawn out. Dragons, and the other paintings gathered here, decline this contract. Instead of offering an emotional exchange, they proceed by attrition. The viewer comes searching for a human gaze to retrieve from the scene—some remaining sign of recognition—and finds, gradually and without ceremony, that their own gaze has begun to adjust. What first appears monstrous comes to seem less an aberration than a way of seeing that one is quietly acquiring.

This is the subdued humiliation of testimony: its inability to redeem what it records. Silence, in this context, does not register as refusal or dignity, but as what remains when language fails to close the gap between “I saw it” and “it mattered.” Looking does not bring one closer to suffering or pleasure, nor even to their comprehension; it brings one closer to the system that produces them both. The eye adapts. It becomes competent. Judgement enters without announcement, followed by something more corrosive. The victims begin to look weak, and because weakness is never permitted to explain suffering, it starts to resemble consent. Alienation, at that point, ceases to feel like a choice and settles into something closer to a condition.

Why look at these paintings at all? Perhaps because meaning itself has come to function as a narrative convenience—history arranged to simulate understanding. Images resist this impulse. They isolate a moment and leave it where it falls, insisting on its specificity. This refusal is often described as a limitation. It may be closer to the last remaining form of honesty: the insistence that violence not be absorbed into category or abstraction, but encountered as the singular fact of a body being rendered into something else.

Movement through Dragons is organised with near-administrative calm. One passes from neutral daylight into jungle and canopy, into an environment of foliage and shadow; steps over rusting machine guns and candy—objects associated with labour and nourishment, now equally inert—and is guided, with little room for deviation, toward an atmosphere already determined by the paintings themselves. A catalogue of degradations accumulates: defaced bodies; snakes; death riding its skeletonised horse; shattered limbs; acts suspended between sex and violence; consumed bodies; frogs; eyes staring from openings. The effect is not escalation but fatigue. What disturbs is not the extremity of what is shown so much as the position the viewer finds themselves occupying.

The paintings persist in acts of watching—watching horror, watching violation—and through this persistence they implicate. To keep looking is to become, gradually and without drama, a passive accomplice: not to an acrylic painting, but to a crime.