riding with death
Clearly inspired by “Riding with Death,” one of Basquiat’s last works. Astride a skeletal steed, a black man journeys in the shadow of his own decay. Rotting flesh, a testament to a consumed life, unveils itself in a macabre dance with the beyond. His arms, reduced to bony relics, bear the burden of the ephemeral.
The rider defies his fate, a decomposing silhouette emerging from the darkness. The emaciated horse averts its head, probing the viewer’s soul with its empty eye sockets. Simple forms, almost silhouettes, stand out against the background, silent cries in the night of existence.
A streamlined composition, the two entities captured in a fatal triangle, like the last remnants of an inevitable tragedy. The work exhales a morbid poetry, where the essence of life and death intertwines in a funereal dance, weaving a dark tapestry in the fabric of nothingness.