In the darkness of caves, beneath moist blankets of limestone, bodies were first traced in charcoal and ochre. Not as exact likenesses, but as impressions of existence. Across centuries, through intellectual evolution and institutional refinement, figuration came to be understood as an accurate and proportionate representation of the body. The emergence of abstraction in the early 20th century and the eventual dominance of its dogma led to a profound shift. Frustrated with these strict codes, artists found new ways to express themselves, and within a few decades, the art world was forever changed. ‘Good art’ no longer had to adhere to a set of rules; the figure was included in this rebellion. Instead, it became a site where form could fracture, stretch or dissolve in order to carry something less visible, allowing emotion and especially identity to surface. Today, artists such as Chidy Wayne and Makan Negahban engage with the body as a central motif, but they are able to do so in markedly different ways. Wayne turns inward, constructing symbolic and materially dense figures that speak to identity and inner conflict. Negahban, by contrast, captures something more transient, where movement and gesture hold onto the fleeting nature of lived experience. In both cases, the figure does not resolve into clarity, but remains open, unsettled, and in the process of becoming.
In the practice of Chidy Wayne, the figure is presented as a coded surface through which identity is tested, fractured and reassembled. Across Wayne’s EGO series, the body is a recurring motif, particularly the hand and the palm, which function less as anatomical forms and more as psychological instruments. As noted in his BOON_ROOM exhibition Rooms, Wayne constructs a visual language of swift, almost automatic marks that draw on ancestral memory, urban gesture and philosophical reflection, allowing each figure to carry a sense of inner conflict rather than external description. In EGO 104, this logic is intensified through visual reduction and distortion. The figure appears immediately unstable, built from dense, layered black lines that refuse smooth resolution. In the foreground, the black and white overlined hand is enlarged and dislocated from natural proportion with its silhouette defined by a wrinkled contour. The image oscillates between formation and collapse. Areas of the background interrupt the density of marks, producing a rhythm of presence and absence that mirrors a psychological fragmentation. The surface feels intentionally unsettled, as if drawn with hesitation and repetition, echoing Wayne’s process of working through control and its breakdown. Rather than offering a readable representation, the work becomes a visual register of internal pressure, where identity is not shown but continuously negotiated through gesture. In this sense, the figure operates as a symbolic site of the human condition, suspended between control and surrender, coherence and disintegration.
Where Chidy Wayne constructs the figure as a fractured site of identity and psychological tension, Makan Negahban approaches figuration as lived experience, where the body is a record of presence in time. His paintings operate through immediacy, often executed quickly on raw surfaces, allowing gestures to function as both image and trace. Negahban’s practice holds the figure in a continuous state of emergence, as something felt before it is understood, and already dissolving as it appears. This approach echoes the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a mid-20th-century philosopher associated with phenomenology, who understood the body not as an object to be observed, but as the very means through which the world is perceived. For Merleau-Ponty, perception is always embodied, meaning that sensation and understanding are inseparable. In this sense, Negahban’s figures do not represent the body as a fixed image, but as a lived and continuously unfolding experience. In GO, this sense of ephemerality is made visually explicit through a composition built on urgency and fragmentation. The figures appear mid-motion, caught in a moment of propulsion that resists full legibility. Form is constructed through rapid, layered brushwork, where fluid strokes appear to accumulate over a dark background into the suggestion of bodies with only some of their traits completed. There is a strong sense of velocity in the marks themselves, as if the painting has been made in direct correspondence with movement. Areas of loosened paint and gestural interruption prevent the image from settling, creating a rhythm of formation and erosion across the surface. Within this instability, Negahban captures figuration not as representation but as experience, where the body is only briefly encountered in the act of becoming. In doing so, he produces records of human experience that echo Merleau-Ponty’s mid-20th-century understanding of perception as embodied rather than detached observation.
Across both practices, figures hold the residue of human presence as something unstable and continually negotiated. What remains is the body as the conditions through which it is sensed, through pressure, movement and the shifting limits of form as it gathers and disperses. Contemporary figuration returns here to an ancient impulse, where making becomes a way of holding experience. The viewer is drawn into a space of suspension, where meaning forms slowly through attention and duration. The figures linger at the edge of resolution, unfolding beyond their own surfaces, carrying the trace of what Gilles Deleuze, a late-20th-century philosopher, describes as a state of becoming. For Deleuze, identity is never fixed but constantly in process, shaped through movement and transformation rather than stable form. In this way, figures remain open, unsettled, and continuously in the act of becoming.