Nothing in this painting hits harder than the tiles. They pull you into the bathroom and make you a silent witness to whatever Arman is about to do with that razor, and you sense it may not stop at one cut. The man who painted it was born in Warsaw and spends his life being stared at and judged for his Armenian roots, yet he is one of the warmest people you could meet. That is exactly why this picture is so hard to look at.
The painter
Arman Galstyan (born 1994) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where he studied with Mirosław Bałka and Paweł Susid. Warsaw-born and of Armenian roots, he paints domestic life and its small private rituals, and often returns in his own pictures as a watched, vulnerable figure. The ordinary scene, painted large, takes on the weight of something monumental.