Self-Portrait as Stranger

This self-portrait investigates identity through expressive distortion, heightened color, and a direct frontal gaze. Rather than seeking conventional likeness, the work presents the face as a site of tension between self-recognition and estrangement. Thick, assertive brushwork in green, orange, black, and violet breaks the surface into unstable planes, suggesting a self that is present yet unsettled. The dark, animated background serves as an extention for this intensity, functioning less as environment and more as an echo of the subject's inner turbulence. The painting resists polish in favor of immediacy, friction, and emotional truth. Through its expressionistic handling, it explores alterity, self-perception, and the instability of identity, proposing the self as something continuously reimagined.