2026

paintings, collaboration

Some Boys is part of the long-term project Conversations (initiated in 2013), based on interviews with children aged seven to ten, from different social, economic, and cultural backgrounds. Through their answers to questions about everyday life, gender roles, and play, the project observes how social norms and systems of values are internalized before individual identity is fully formed.

The painting originates from a commissioned child’s drawing and a recorded statement from the Conversations series describing “what boys are like.” Translated into acrylic on canvas, the image exposes masculinity as a learned and performative construct rather than a natural condition. Children’s play—often perceived as innocent and neutral—appears here as a space where behavioral patterns, hierarchies, and exclusions are rehearsed and normalized within a predominantly patriarchal and macho social framework.

The background is derived from an early 20th-century American children’s educational book, digitally altered to remove all figures and leave only an idealized natural setting. Translated into paint, it functions as a seemingly neutral yet ideologically charged environment into which the figures are later inserted. The partially erased and unstable bodies suggest vulnerability and the absence of a fixed identity.

Rather than representing queer identity directly, the work examines the mechanisms through which difference is identified, named, and often negatively evaluated at an early age.

By focusing on childhood as a site of social conditioning, Some Boys offers a reading of how normative masculinity is produced, maintained, and enforced long before it becomes consciously questioned.