Man'Si's homelessness and lockdown paintings make escapism and abstract expressionism at their finest, like forgotten pictures drawn by an abandoned, mistreated child who had been raised in a cage in his own home that was me growing up.

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These colourful canvases were born in the bottom of a dark cave from the small seeds of hope I cultivated in my lone immigrant's broken heart that endured three rough years in and out of homelessness and throughout COVID-19 lockdown, struggling in a most painful and dreary chapter of my life when I was toiling back and forth from the public park I called Home to toxic hostels and whatnot... and yet, see how colourful I saw the world still, because of how much of an optimist I've always been nonetheless, my smile never leaving my face, my cold hands still kind and giving. I like to think that my bizarre optimism deserves to be celebrated and admired, that I make a living an emblem for joy and patience, self-composure and peace, that I've somehow managed to come out of everything that led many a man astray even saner than I've ever been my whole life, that these paintings shall receive the mindfulness they deserve.

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In this exhibition (scrolling down and starting from the bottom going upwards), you may notice that the theme of the first four paintings have nothing in common, but that’s because they happened to be experiments as I just started to reconnect with my lost dream and passion for art way too late just a few days before plunging into homelessness, as becoming an artist to start with had always been my biggest dream until it was stripped away from my innocent hands along with my freedom and happiness when I was just 9 years old because of religious nonsense... 

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These first six paintings were, respectively, Liberation Von (of) Gogh, Unwanted, Absence, Blossoming, Wonderful Peace, then later, Rainbow, which was even made with a tiny, broken wood chip and a couple of small tubes of old paint, unlike every privileged artist who had literally everything I never had to begin with, but everyone starts from somewhere, and I started from zero, nothing. The reason why my artwork Wonderful Peace back then, unlike the other five, seems to resonate with the general theme of all the other paintings I’ve produced later in this exhibition will be explained in its designated part because it both has a special story and lives as the accidental epiphany into my style; a ‘happy accident’ as we artists like to call it.

 

Growing up abandoned in apocalyptic environments with my siblings, neglected and starved, always put down and ridiculed by everybody, friends and family including our own parents, abused mentally and physically, told we were better off not to have been born because we made such pathetic nuisance, I found my own way to go about healing my ever-bleeding wounds with fashion as an escape from reality, with beauty and colours, writing and drawing to ignore and forget, the way the saga behind my fashion brand ex'cesoir resonates with my artworks and crafts, making the habit of tinkering and revitalizing what's broken to solve problems evolve with me as a stoic, subconscious automation to survive my cruel reality, which turned into becoming my forte as it grew stronger with me all the while I never got the chance and opportunity or the simple support to cultivate my dreamy, artistic talents, and throughout homelessness later in my adulthood especially as my book The Homeless Photographer: An Album of Self-reflection (2023) would tell you. Since I've been deprived of art since childhood unlike other happy kids who were showered with loved and support and were provided for in every step in their journey on the other hand, completely  self-taught, I managed to wind my way out of the cocoon of hopelessness and the webs of misfortune eventually by staying sincere to my unique spirit, gratefully living as a starving-artist after all the humiliation and harassment I failed to keep up with jumping between toxic jobs, one worse than another.

 

My most notable artwork in this traumatic era was Tsunami, (which inspired Typhoon next), because it portrayed my feelings inverted, revealing the true feelings I've been hiding from the world and even myself back then breaking out of my chest like lava from a volcanic eruption as I was pushed out of my mind, but still, I held my head high with self-composure that I grounded myself to believe in the human power over their sanity to master controlling these emotions, thus effortlessly turning them into such graceful aestheteics nonetheless by pure resilience, newfound wisdom, a sprinkle of absurdism, and a scoop of passion for beauty; I've always been buying myself ice-cream in difficult times to a point a client bought me one themselves once.

 

Joy is so simple...

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Tsunami was a storm I produced when I had a mental breakdown at some point like the universe does whenever it felt like destroying everything in the hope it can rebuild a whole new story, when I started stabbing and scooping the thick and colourful layers of paint represented many failed attempts on a compact though very heavy canvas because it was the only canvas I had and the natural phenomena created wave-like appearance because the universe is sly with its works, so I coated the disaster we made together with some gentle blue and white to bring our collaborative vision come into being, to stay grounded, which explains the specs of vibrant colours peeping through from beneath the surface of the mad waves (emotions) that broke free out of me without a warning: anger, sorrow, hopelessness and pain, every feeling I've always tried to conceal and jump over, and I tripped when I felt like my tragedy was dismissed by heartless judges who claimed that they celebrated originality so I wasn't spared any art opportunities or art grants, because they decided that a cliche artwork of a lone chair that was a literal copy of Vincent Van Gogh's that only portrayed the one common human emotion during lock-down, aloneness, was somehow more worthy of my Tale of Aloneness itself because in this case, I make the Sorrowing Man in the chair himself.

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I don't think that my silly and first artwork, Liberation Von (of) Gogh had to do with Vincent Van Gogh by sheer accident, as if the universe knew my fate and was giving me signs, the way it always does as Mother Nature takes good care of lost children such as me, lulling me into warmer sleep in my cold corner on the hard bench in the dark park where I slept back when I was homeless, giggling at the soothing rain and the quarrels of the night animals, watched over by Wisdom, the silent horned owl who kept me company sometimes with its simple presence.