SR26: Saint Sebastian

Saint Sebastian takes the most painted martyr in Western art — the soldier the canon allowed to be beautiful, shot full of arrows and turned into six centuries of agony and desire — and hands the position to a Black body that refuses to be looked at. He is a shadow on a field of gold. Bound at the wrists, face given over to something past the frame, he is caught in the martyr's only posture: surrender. The arrows here are not arrows; they are light — the same gold as the ground behind him, entering the figure, crossing it, leaving it luminous where it should be broken. One wound bleeds: a single red line down his centre, the cost of being made flesh, running off the canvas and into the eternal. Not a man to be pitied. A god to be kept.