Dé·jà vu for the very first time

Welcome back, thanks for stopping by. I’ll try to keep them coming.

This week it’s a tip of the hat to a few things.

LE RÉTRO-INGÉNIEUR (THE REVERSE ENGINEER). 2025. watercolor, gouache and ink on Arches paper. 22.5 x 30 inches.

When I dropped my latest piece, The Reverse Engineer, last week, one of the first reactions I got was, “Channeling Magritte…”. I didn’t set out to do that, but I thought, why not lean into it and reverse-engineer a bit of boilerplate Surrealist interpretation, the kind that plays with your mind.

I’ve wandered into that weird space where perception, reality, and the murkier corners of the subconscious collide, taking a page from Magritte’s playbook. The scene is set in a beach house, where a flesh-peach wall meets cold, bleached floors—an unsettling mix of warmth and emptiness, familiarity and an unsaid absence. The bare floor, like the echo of a forgotten dream, suggests impermanence—something that’s there, but slipping through your fingers, always just out of reach, like a breath held between heartbeats.

A curved window—almost too subtle to notice—opens onto the horizon, where the ocean meets the sky on a distant line, a threshold to something unknown. Magritte was a master at using windows as gateways between the real and the imagined, and here, I’m doing the same—inviting you to question the space between what’s seen and what’s unseen. The wave, caught in the endless rhythm of time, speaks to emotions and thoughts that shape us but always stay just beyond our grasp.

Inside, a coat rack stands sentry—holding an umbrella and a fedora, symbols of identity, yet strangely passive, waiting for something that will never come. The hat hovers as if ready to leap off the wall, while a weed-eater, abandoned on the floor, breaks the silence—a discordant interruption, a tool of removal left behind in nature’s chaos. It’s a nod to our futile attempts to tame the wild, to impose order or a new reality on what refuses to be tamed. It’s the battle we all face, where control slips through our fingers like sand.

The Treachery of Images (1929) by René Magritte

At the heart of this painting is the act of dissection—taking familiar objects and yanking them out of their context, stitching them into something incongruous, something unsettling. Magritte’s The Treachery of Images still checks me with its reminder of the gap between words and the world they try to describe—how what we see is never really the thing itself. Here, I’m trying to capture that elusive truth, showing you the world as it isn’t—an invitation to the mystery, to that space between perception and reality.

Like Magritte’s surreal worlds, this piece doesn’t offer answers. It just invites you to drift in the experience of questions. It’s a space where the known and unknown blur together, where what’s visible and invisible exist side by side, always just out of reach. It’s a challenge to rethink the boundaries of existence, to question the shifting terrain of thought and memory that haunts us, like shadows that never quite leave.

Ultimately, I hope this piece acts as a mirror for introspection—quietly forcing you to reconsider how you perceive the world, and how the world, in turn, perceives you. Like Magritte’s works, it begs you to stop, to linger in the mystery, and to question the fragile line between what’s real and what’s imagined.

Or.

Perhaps it’s simply a portrait of a lonely man left with the empty aftermath of being dead set on chopping things down.

And hey, if you're into this, maybe grab a hand-signed giclée print of the piece from my new shop. Available in three sizes. Limited-edition, hand-signed, and numbered. Framing? Yeah, I got you. Reach out. Sign up for my newsletter. Let’s make it happen. Buy some art.