ALL BUT

ALL BUT, 2026
 
ALL BUT is a painting about the almost.
Not about the absence of connection, but about its recurring presence.
 
About two beings who find one another, recognize one another, lose one another, and meet again — under different conditions, in different bodies, times and systems.
 
Several shared incarnations form the underlying layer of the work. Yet these stories are not illustrated.
They are overwritten.
 
Historical fragments transform into new bodies, landscapes, beings and spaces. Memory loses its chronology and begins to behave like a psychological system: things appear simultaneously, contradict one another, disappear and re-emerge elsewhere.
 
Yellow lines run through this layer like a hidden coordinate system. They offer possible points of entry without prescribing how the work should be read. From there, the eye begins to search.
 
What is found no longer belongs to the artist alone.
Faces become landscapes.
Landscapes become bodies.
Bodies become architecture.
Architecture becomes memory.
 
A dot may become an eye, a star, a being or a form of energy.
A line may become a road, a nerve, a boundary or a connection.
 
The painting therefore operates less like a narrative than a psychological field of projection. Personal experiences, fears, memories, desires and associations enter the work through the act of looking and alter its meaning.
 
A passage leads into the image toward a small white light. It may be read as a road, a river, a cut through time, a birth canal or a threshold.
 
What BECKER himself recognizes within it is only one possible version.
 
Around it, everything happens at once.
Beings rise.
Others disappear.
Faces observe.
Bodies open.
Something struggles to reach the other side.
 
And again and again, dots appear.
Like eyes.
Like stars.
Like cells.
Like souls.
Like brief manifestations within a much larger system.
 
Color organizes this world.
Violet forms its underlying state — connection, spirit, friction and development. Within the visual system of the series, these qualities are assigned to the violet Soul-Code.
 
Blue moves through the work like water. It connects and separates at the same time. It is distance and movement, but also the tear of finding one another again and the tear of losing one another once more.
 
Red appears as a signal: love, desire, pain, danger, war. It occupies specific areas rather than taking over the entire image.
 
Flesh tones return the metaphysical structure to the body. Chest, head and connection become material. Here, incarnation also means that a connection must eventually pass through a human body.
 
Black and white do not form a moral opposition. They create depth, absence, light, counterforce and transition.
 
Throughout the work, small figures, words and grotesque apparitions interrupt the larger pathos of the narrative.
 
WAIT!
WHAT?
NO.
KISS ME.
HERE.
 
Humor sits beside longing. Sex beside spirituality. Fear beside love. Absurdity beside tragedy.
In this way, the work resists romantic idealization.
 
The connection may appear metaphysical.
The beings within it remain contradictory.
 
This is where the central tension of ALL BUT lies.
 
The problem is not that two beings fail to recognize one another.
They may recognize one another again and again.
 
The problem is that recognition does not necessarily create fulfillment.
Between desire and embodiment lie duty, fear, social order, doubt, shame, time and the different limits of two consciousnesses.
 
On one side, something emerges like:
Nothing can defeat us.
 
On the other:
I can't.
 
Perhaps this is where the tragedy of the work lies.
Not in the absence of feeling.
But in the inability to fully translate feeling into reality.
 
The title keeps this condition unresolved:
 
ALL BUT.
Almost arrived.
Almost touched.
Almost united.
 
Everything is there.
Except the last thing.
 
And then the cycle begins again.