This painting began with a small moment I caught in myself while listening to a boring podcast. I noticed the unconscious gesture of picking my nose. In that instant, it struck me that I was so completely uninterested and so untouched by what I was hearing that my body had already expressed what my mind had not yet articulated.
I think this gesture contains more than we usually allow it to. Socially, it is treated as improper, embarrassing, and even unacceptable. But I became interested in it as a manifestation of pure, unprocessed emotion, a bodily sign of disconnection, indifference, and refusal. In that sense, it can reveal a moment of honesty in which a person is no longer performing attention, politeness, or self control.
What interests me is the tension between instinct and social norms. Sometimes such gestures help us recognise what we actually feel and return to ourselves. In other situations, they create discomfort and expose the fragility of our social codes. For me, the value of this image lies precisely in showing how an awkward, almost taboo gesture can become a direct expression of an inner state before it is filtered, corrected, or hidden.