Monocle Man: The Architecture of the Gaze
The Monocle Man painting series is a playful evolution of my 2020 pandemic installation on Lincoln Road, Miami Beach. While the original storefront project served as a “public diary” of the era, these paintings dive deeper by using the character to explore how everyday observations can be transformed (perhaps as a reaction to the pandemic’s heaviness) into whimsical, rhythmic black and white imagery.
Rendered in a black-and-white palette, these works are a study in narrative mise-en-scène. Here I used the repetition of this dapper, monocled figure to create a world that is both elegant and absurd—a visual representation of how life’s moments are processed through cycles and figurative motifs.
Though the works are lighthearted, it retains the “unblinking eye” concept that made the original Lincoln Road motif so powerful and playfully mirrors that surveillance.
