The Guardian of Darkness

The Guardian of Darkness is an open wound on cardboard, a visual cry born in 1995 from a fragile and rebellious mind, raised within the walls of a mental health center. The work, made with pencil and rough tempera, betrays a nervous tension that runs through every line, every stroke of color. The male body, naked and disjointed, is a disfigured totem, a hybrid between human and beast, with the face reduced to a fixed mask, halfway between demon and sentinel.

The red outline surrounding the figure is not just a graphic margin, but an aura of alarm, a vibration that separates the subject from the world and at the same time imprisons him within his own silhouette. Red and black, colors of urgency and inner violence, clash with the brutal nakedness of the body, marked by a total absence of idealization. Here the body is neither seduction nor anatomy, but pure suffering existence.

The mocha oak frame adds a disturbing contrast: its elegance is an aesthetic cage, a bourgeois formality that seeks to contain an image that instead rejects any norm, any pacification. The work was shown for the first time in 1996 during a collective exhibition organized by the center itself, in which the patients' works were presented as therapeutic fragments. But The Guardian of Darkness goes beyond therapy: it is a disturbing icon of an exploded identity, of a body that does not recognize itself and that, precisely for this reason, becomes a universal metaphor for our relationship with fear, shame and the desire for control.

Through this spectral figure, R95 signs a work that does not seek explanations, but forces the viewer to a direct confrontation with his own shadow. It is brutal art, in the literal sense: it is born from a fracture, lives in its own incompleteness, and is extinguished only when the gaze of the observer finds the strength to look away.