Hallucination (The Game of Empires)

This collage stages an uneasy parliament of symbols—coin, chess knight, wax seal, and world map—each a different grammar of authority, pressed against a bleak seascape of ruin and predatory fish. The composition tilts our gaze from regal portraiture and strategic iconography into a watery theatre where empires feel less built than eroded, their monuments stranded like shipwrecks in a storm of consequence. A single, glossy red seal punctures the greys with bureaucratic finality, suggesting how decisions made in distant chambers stain the planet below, binding geography to decree. In the tension between metallic sheen, sepulchral atmosphere, and ornamental cartography, the work reads as a meditation on power’s circulation—how it is minted, played, signed, and ultimately swallowed by time.