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Whispers
“There is an imbalance in asking someone to call you, though it took me time to recognize it. The request always appears simple, almost neutral. But the action it proposes belongs completely to the other person, while the exposure settles quietly on the one who asks. I noticed this only after I had already written the words, when it was too late to pretend they were just ornamental.
Nothing in the request promises reciprocity. It does not even promise a response. It merely announces availability. To ask is to accept that the next movement is no longer yours, and to still, somehow remain present anyway. I am not especially practiced in this posture. I am more accustomed to closing distance myself, to mistaking initiative for safety. Waiting, I have learned, is a different discipline altogether, it asks for stillness, to listen rather than advance.
The phrase written in the painting reads simply: call me. I did not soften it. I resisted the metaphor. The directness felt faintly embarrassing, which is how I knew it was necessary. A call is an interruption. It collapses distance abruptly. To invite one is to acknowledge that silence has already begun to contour the body, that attention has already oriented itself toward an absence.
At the center of the painting is a winged snake. When I chose it, I did not experience it as a contradiction. It felt more like recognition, like an inevitable being. Snakes move through sensation. They understands the world as vibration, as proximity, as threat and invitation carried through the ground, It reads what is near, what is approaching, what is withdrawing. The wings do not cancel this closeness; they just, complicate it. They hover as possibility, they represent the knowledge that departure exists, without the necessity of taking it.
I am drawn to figures that resist resolution. The winged snake does not choose between instinct and transcendence. It holds both, without hierarchy. It does not need certainty in order to remain alert. It does not rush forward, nor does it retreat. It listens with its entire length. This, I realized, is often how desire first arrives for me, not as an intention, but as heightened sensitivity. A sharpening of perception before intention has formed.
The wings do not guarantee escape. If anything, they intensify the difficulty of staying. To remain while knowing you could leave is a more demanding state than confinement. This tension, between autonomy and attachment, is where intimacy becomes most exacting. The unstable coexistence. The effort required to hold both without resolving either of them is partly what makes early on stage intimacy so precarious.
Red stars repeat insistently across the surface of the painting. Stars usually offer guidance or reassurance, if anything they represent hope. Multiplied like this, they sort of soften, they lose their authority. They become noise, expectation, pattern, the familiar hum of instruction about how love is meant to unfold. While painting them, I became aware of how easily such ideas interfere with listening. How quickly assumption substitutes sensation.
In the lower corner sits a small flower. It arrived later, almost reluctantly. I understood it as consequence. A reminder that desire is never neutral, that even a modest request carries weight. To ask to be called is to risk disappointment, refusal, misreading. It is to allow oneself to be visible in a posture that cannot be revised once assumed.
What occupied me while making this painting was not whether the call would come, but what it costs to remain reachable. Waiting is often mistaken for passivity. In practice, it demands vigilance, restraint, and a tolerance for uncertainty that does not come naturally to me. It asks me not to resolve desire prematurely, neither through possession nor withdrawal, both of which offer the comfort of conclusion.
Whispers feels like an admission. Not of love itself, but of susceptibility. Of allowing another person’s movement, or their stillness, to matter. Of agreeing, briefly, to stand without armor, to not to protect myself through resolution.
The painting does not answer its own request. The call may never come. The winged snake continues to move, listening, capable of flight but not committed to it. Love does not always arrive as certainty. Sometimes it arrives as exposure. Sometimes it arrives as a sentence that places the next move outside your control.
What remains is the gesture.
Not hopeful. Not strategic.
Simply placed.
Call me.” - Antonia xx
Printed on 200g natural art paper with a matte, uncoated finish and lightly textured surface, that ensures a rich and vibrant display of colors.
Sustainability is important to us, that is why our prints are made to order and not printed until the order is received. All orders are printed and shipped within 3 business days of receiving the order.
Fits standard sized frames. The frame is not included.
No additional taxes or import duties will be charged on orders
shipped to the United States, Canada, European Union, EEA,
United Kingdom, Australia, or New Zealand.If your order has been damaged or lost within 1 month of shipment you are eligible for a complimentary reprint.
All sales are final and cannot be cancelled.
“There is an imbalance in asking someone to call you, though it took me time to recognize it. The request always appears simple, almost neutral. But the action it proposes belongs completely to the other person, while the exposure settles quietly on the one who asks. I noticed this only after I had already written the words, when it was too late to pretend they were just ornamental.
Nothing in the request promises reciprocity. It does not even promise a response. It merely announces availability. To ask is to accept that the next movement is no longer yours, and to still, somehow remain present anyway. I am not especially practiced in this posture. I am more accustomed to closing distance myself, to mistaking initiative for safety. Waiting, I have learned, is a different discipline altogether, it asks for stillness, to listen rather than advance.
The phrase written in the painting reads simply: call me. I did not soften it. I resisted the metaphor. The directness felt faintly embarrassing, which is how I knew it was necessary. A call is an interruption. It collapses distance abruptly. To invite one is to acknowledge that silence has already begun to contour the body, that attention has already oriented itself toward an absence.
At the center of the painting is a winged snake. When I chose it, I did not experience it as a contradiction. It felt more like recognition, like an inevitable being. Snakes move through sensation. They understands the world as vibration, as proximity, as threat and invitation carried through the ground, It reads what is near, what is approaching, what is withdrawing. The wings do not cancel this closeness; they just, complicate it. They hover as possibility, they represent the knowledge that departure exists, without the necessity of taking it.
I am drawn to figures that resist resolution. The winged snake does not choose between instinct and transcendence. It holds both, without hierarchy. It does not need certainty in order to remain alert. It does not rush forward, nor does it retreat. It listens with its entire length. This, I realized, is often how desire first arrives for me, not as an intention, but as heightened sensitivity. A sharpening of perception before intention has formed.
The wings do not guarantee escape. If anything, they intensify the difficulty of staying. To remain while knowing you could leave is a more demanding state than confinement. This tension, between autonomy and attachment, is where intimacy becomes most exacting. The unstable coexistence. The effort required to hold both without resolving either of them is partly what makes early on stage intimacy so precarious.
Red stars repeat insistently across the surface of the painting. Stars usually offer guidance or reassurance, if anything they represent hope. Multiplied like this, they sort of soften, they lose their authority. They become noise, expectation, pattern, the familiar hum of instruction about how love is meant to unfold. While painting them, I became aware of how easily such ideas interfere with listening. How quickly assumption substitutes sensation.
In the lower corner sits a small flower. It arrived later, almost reluctantly. I understood it as consequence. A reminder that desire is never neutral, that even a modest request carries weight. To ask to be called is to risk disappointment, refusal, misreading. It is to allow oneself to be visible in a posture that cannot be revised once assumed.
What occupied me while making this painting was not whether the call would come, but what it costs to remain reachable. Waiting is often mistaken for passivity. In practice, it demands vigilance, restraint, and a tolerance for uncertainty that does not come naturally to me. It asks me not to resolve desire prematurely, neither through possession nor withdrawal, both of which offer the comfort of conclusion.
Whispers feels like an admission. Not of love itself, but of susceptibility. Of allowing another person’s movement, or their stillness, to matter. Of agreeing, briefly, to stand without armor, to not to protect myself through resolution.
The painting does not answer its own request. The call may never come. The winged snake continues to move, listening, capable of flight but not committed to it. Love does not always arrive as certainty. Sometimes it arrives as exposure. Sometimes it arrives as a sentence that places the next move outside your control.
What remains is the gesture.
Not hopeful. Not strategic.
Simply placed.
Call me.” - Antonia xx
Printed on 200g natural art paper with a matte, uncoated finish and lightly textured surface, that ensures a rich and vibrant display of colors.
Sustainability is important to us, that is why our prints are made to order and not printed until the order is received. All orders are printed and shipped within 3 business days of receiving the order.
Fits standard sized frames. The frame is not included.
No additional taxes or import duties will be charged on orders
shipped to the United States, Canada, European Union, EEA,
United Kingdom, Australia, or New Zealand.If your order has been damaged or lost within 1 month of shipment you are eligible for a complimentary reprint.
All sales are final and cannot be cancelled.