Smile is a framed work that began in 2018, when the artist Bouda visited my first studio and gifted me a shirt painted with a face. I kept it with me for a long time, treating it almost like a relic, until years later, in 2022, while I was in my third studio, it evolved into something else. By then, I had already added a dollar bill, a material I have always loved to draw on, especially 100-dollar bills, because of the strange tension they carry between value, image, power, and spectacle.

On that dollar I drew Berlusconi, a figure I associated with a politics built around smiling, performance, and the construction of a public image that tried to appear funny, reassuring, and likable, especially in front of the camera. For me, that kind of staged charm has never been a real value. I read it instead as a form of falseness, a polished mask, a smile that hides rather than reveals. That is the core of the piece.

The work became a reaction to that idea. I intervened on it violently, shooting it six times, not as an empty gesture, but as the physical release of a discomfort I felt toward everything that image represented: fake charisma, mediated identity, and the distance between appearance and truth. In that sense, Smile is not about smiling as joy, but about smiling as camouflage. It is a work about the image as deception, about the mask of power, and about the anger that can come from seeing performance mistaken for honesty.

Because the piece is built from layered elements, a gifted shirt, a framed object kept over time, a dollar bill, a political face, and the final rupturing act, it carries both memory and confrontation. Smile becomes the collision between gift and wound, display and aggression, surface and rupture. What looks at first like a face ends up becoming a target, and what begins as a smile ends as a question about what that smile was really hiding.

Half of the earned import will be redirect to Bouda.