Pull the thread.
Open to collaborations, commissions and conversations.
A man kneels in a bare room with his hand on a small block. In front of him is a wall, and at its base a narrow triangular hole. He pushes. The block strikes the wall. A crack opens. He pushes again. On the fifth blow the wall comes down, and behind it stands the same wall, whole, with the same small hole at its foot. He looks up. Then he lowers his head and puts his hand back on the block.
Futility began as a painting, made by hand in thick, restless strokes. The palette is dust and skin: grey plaster, raw umber, the pink of a body that has worked too long. The only saturated colour is a thin red cord running across the floor toward the hole. I wanted the man to look heavy and exhausted, and the room to look like it was built to outlast him.
To make the painting move, I took it apart. The figure was repainted as separate pieces: head, torso, back, hip, each thigh and shin, each arm in two parts, the block, the wall and the shadows, eighteen layers in all. Every hidden surface was painted through, so that when a limb moves you never see a hole behind it. When the layers are stacked, the original painting is there exactly as it was.
No bone in this piece cuts the paint. Thirty-six control points sit inside the body, and the paint is stretched between them on a fine mesh, the way skin moves over muscle. The feet and the back knee are pinned to the floor. The hips lead the push, the back follows, the shoulder drops and the arm drives the block forward. The head does not wobble. It is carried by the neck and bows slightly into the effort.
The wall keeps count. The first blow opens two cracks at the tip of the triangular hole. The second carries them a little further. By the third they reach a third of the way up the wall, and by the fourth, halfway. The cracks run in short straight lines and sudden turns, the way plaster actually breaks.
On the fifth blow the wall gives way. It breaks along the lines the cracks have drawn, and the pieces fall as real slabs, with thickness, weight and spin. The lowest ones go first. They hit the floor, tip over, slide and settle in their own dust. Behind them is the same wall.
The piece only moves when you touch it. Touch the man or the block and he pushes. Touch again and he pushes again. Nothing you do changes the outcome: five blows, a collapse, the same wall. The work is complete only when someone keeps touching it, knowing exactly what will happen.
Futility · interactive painting by YEKTA. Edition 1/1 · Minting Monday, 19 October 2026 on OBJKT · Tezos.
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Open to collaborations, commissions and conversations.