I Better Sleep investigates withdrawal as a conscious strategy for psychological and existential survival. The work centers on a reclining female figure whose body turns away from an undefined darkness behind her — a darkness that operates not only as a literal absence of light, but as a metaphor for violence, social fracture, and the persistent pressures of contemporary life.
Rather than confronting this obscured field, the figure chooses sleep as an alternative mode of engagement. In this sense, sleep is not presented as passivity but as a deliberate refusal: a form of quiet resistance that suspends the demand to witness, endure, or respond. The gesture echoes theoretical discussions around retreat as a protective threshold — a space where the subject temporarily withdraws from the overwhelming intensity of the world.
By turning her back to the unseen, the figure inaugurates a private zone in which vulnerability becomes agency. Sleep becomes a sheltering act, a method of reclaiming autonomy in the face of what cannot be negotiated or transformed. The darkness remains present, yet it is denied access; its potential threat is met with the soft but decisive boundary of disengagement.
I Better Sleep thus frames rest as a conceptual strategy — not the negation of reality, but the creation of a fragile interior space where the self can endure, recalibrate, and resist through quiet disappearance.

65*200 cm
Watercolour on paper
2024