Diver_se #2 is part of my diver series in MK23.

 It contains the word diver, of course, but also diverse, because this image is not about a fixed identity. In MK23, reality never stays obedient. It gets filtered, bent, and stripped of certainty. That is why in this piece gender starts to blur. One figure may seem more feminine, another more masculine, but neither is meant to stay trapped there. Both wear the same old bathing suit, the vintage one with the horizontal red and white circus-like stripes.

The diver is suspended in the middle, already rigid, already prepared, but not yet inside the water. That moment is what caught me: the threshold. Not the dive itself, but the instant before it, when the body needs still to touch the water but the soul is already diving deeply in .

The diver’s position is a monument to hesitation. Human fear shatters, and the motto becomes: I know what is below, and I am going anyway.

This work is about the moment before entering the unknown, before pressure, before silence, before the self gets distorted by depth. The diver stands in front of the abyss without yet belonging to it. Nietzsche warned that if you gaze long into an abyss, it gazes back into you. In the moment the diver has not yet entered, is facing a mirror literally and the exchange has already begun.

There is also something almost Wildean in this figure, something de profundis, something already called by the depths before the descent has even happened. The diver is caught in that beautiful and terrible second where preparation becomes fate. The sea has not taken them yet, but it already owns part of the image. As Cousteau put it, “The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.” And that is exactly the feeling here: enchantment mixed with danger, wonder wearing the mask of threat.

So this diver became, for me, a portrait of tension. Not movement, but surrender waiting to happen, ready for it.