When the Format Fails: How I Slowly Found the Real Idea Behind My Work

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For years I believed my portrait work was about the queer body itself. I thought the drawings were centered on presence, absence, erasure, or the familiar narratives of exclusion: not allowed, not recognized, not at the table. But every time I tried to frame my work that way, something felt off. Too familiar. Too rehearsed. Too close to the language so many artists have done.

The truth came into focus only when I started asking a different question.What if my work isn’t about the body?What if it’s about the format used to read the body?

A format is a preset structure - a rule set. A template that decides what counts as normal, acceptable, or comprehensible. Bureaucracy has formats. Medicine has formats. Religion, law, and culture do too. They all pretend to be neutral, but they’re built on histories that leave many lives misread or unreadable. There are consequences - the discipline - that is associated with not adhering to those formats and we adhere to those formats because we see them as normal parts of the society we live in.

At the Table | Dhenae

The more I thought about it, the clearer it became:queer bodies aren’t illegible.The format is inadequate.

Once I understood this, my series At the Table started to reveal what it had been doing all along. The text behind each sitter is formatted like an administrative document: rigid, black, uppercase Helvetica. The typography feels official, even severe. But the words themselves come from the sitter - personal, specific, embodied. Their truth is being squeezed through a format that was never built to hold it. That friction is the point. The format looks authoritative, but it can’t contain the person standing in front of it. There is tension in the reading of this ridgid block of text. The subjects are also present - they sit in a bureucratic room.

The body stays steady.The format then begins to show cracks.

That realization naturally led me into imagining the next phase of my practice - what I’m calling Section 149. The series doesn’t exist yet, but its logic is already taking shape. If At the Table exposes the failure of imposed formats, then Section 149 asks what happens when queer bodies begin to write themselves instead.

I’m thinking of a world where bureaucratic text still surrounds the subject, but no longer defines them. Where the system’s language becomes backdrop, residue, or pressure — and the sitter’s own inscriptions, faint or emerging, begin to surface on the skin as counter-formatting. Not as narrative tattoos, but as marks of agency: the body asserting its own structure of meaning.

This isn’t about the system failing the body anymore.It’s about the body refusing to wait for the system.

If At the Table revealed the limits of legibility, Section 149 imagines the counter-legible body — a body that rewrites the terms of its own recognition.

That is the evolution. Not a new theme, but a deeper understanding of what my work has been moving toward: the moment when lived presence exposes the architecture built to interpret it, and then begins to build something else in its place.