Verdigris

Using screenshots from the 2023 AFC Asia Cup and related global events to generate new paintings and drawings, the proposed project, Verdigris, expands upon the source material with color, form, and physicality. Through easel painting, the captured images become raw material for contemplating how spectacle, labor, and geopolitics circulate through the aesthetics of sport. 

Verdigris, the green pigment, features prominently in the work and inspires the title of the project. The football pitch becomes a green field of labor, choreography, and randomness. Drawing and painting reframe fleeting scenes from the tournament as contemporary genre painting. Injury references the region’s real violence by formalizing it as a central motif. Moments when the spectacle breaks down like injuries, stoppages, and ruptures become key formal criteria for selecting images, painting the figure as the site where politics and visibility converge and render damage. Stadium architecture, sponsorships, and broadcasting rights function as fortresses for bourgeois politics and as enclosures for working‑class ones. 

The project positions the sports event as a lens through which to consider global social relations’ contradictions: its competing nationalisms, its uneven development, its media infrastructures, and its shifting alliances. By slowing down the broadcast image through material processes, the paintings ask how contemporary spectacle can be re‑read through the physicality of color, touch, and time. The 2023 Asia Cup becomes not just a tournament but a stage for intensive, energized color, where the political tensions of a vast and unstable region are aestheticized, contested, and momentarily held together under the fiction of continental unity. 

1. Asian Football Confederation ↩︎
2. “Primary association football competition contested by the senior men’s national teams of the AFC’s members..” Wikipedia, s.v. “AFC Asian CUP,” last modified 2026. ↩︎

drawings

Study for The Emergency
Conté on paper
48 x 48 inches
2026