De DEVIL is in De-Tail – 2025

“Dey Eating de Dogs dey eating de Cats – Dey eating the pets of the people that live there”Oil on Canvas. H76 x W61 cm

This painting was initiated during the Financial crisis of 2008 and it wasn’t until recently that it became imperative to resolve it. The world as we knew it has changed substantially.

Emile Zola had, in Argent (Money) highlighted the toxic dangers of excessive financial accumulation in 1891 – George Orwell had similarly predicted a dystopian world dominated by a greedy few in 1984 written in 1949 – and Margaret Atwood has more recently in her 1985 prescient Handmaid’s Tale envisioned a patriarchal, totalitarian theonomic State.

In our real world WE are currently witnessing and living through a textbook fascist power-grab and takeover of World markets by the most powerful country (at the moment) in the World.

The American Empire, like its Roman and British predecessors was built on exploitation – slavery, drug trafficking and war profiteering et al. It’s power to dominate was derived from a predisposition to belligerence and violence – both domestic and abroad. But over time more progressive ethics and an enlightened morality have, to a limited extent, ameliorated conditions for its subjects at home. It is important to stress that this did not apply to the internationally exploited.

But now the new dispensation of Christian Nationalism and Prosperity Gospel doctrines have upended the old.

Rampant greed has empowered the ultra-privileged.

And the ideological ethos in the titles of the books in Presidential Library/graveyard in my painting will attest this….