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“Numb”
By MAAS
This painting is an X-ray of my body, but also an X-ray of everything I’ve been carrying inside for years.
It is a comparison between two bodies. Two states of being. On one side, a healthy body — so healthy they even place a small camera with a tripod inside it, as if nothing could possibly go wrong. Controlled. Functional. Almost ironic. The kind of body the world expects you to have while you keep moving, working, smiling.
On the other side is my reality. The damaged body. I have been suffering for a long time from a hiatus hernia, born out of stress, chaos, and a life lived at full speed without pause. This is the X-ray on the left. X marks the spot is not just a medical note — it’s an invitation. Find it. Find where the doctor located the hernia, but also find the many other places where life left its fingerprints. Pain is never only in one place.
I mix medical language, diagrams, labels, warnings — the cold way institutions talk about the body — with noise, colour, fear, and overlapping voices. Because that’s what it feels like inside my head and my gut. Too many signals at once. Too much pressure. Too much held in.
Stress doesn’t stay abstract. It burns the throat. It presses the stomach upward. It tightens the diaphragm until breathing becomes a negotiation. The body starts speaking when the mind has gone quiet.
Your guts won’t be televised is a quiet rebellion. Not all pain is visible. Not all damage is spectacular. Some suffering happens slowly, internally, while the world keeps demanding you to function as if nothing is wrong.
This painting is called Numb because there comes a moment when feeling everything becomes too much, and the body chooses silence. But numb doesn’t mean empty. It means overloaded. It means surviving.
This is not just about illness. It’s about endurance. About how the body remembers everything the soul tried to carry alone.
“Numb”
By MAAS
This painting is an X-ray of my body, but also an X-ray of everything I’ve been carrying inside for years.
It is a comparison between two bodies. Two states of being. On one side, a healthy body — so healthy they even place a small camera with a tripod inside it, as if nothing could possibly go wrong. Controlled. Functional. Almost ironic. The kind of body the world expects you to have while you keep moving, working, smiling.
On the other side is my reality. The damaged body. I have been suffering for a long time from a hiatus hernia, born out of stress, chaos, and a life lived at full speed without pause. This is the X-ray on the left. X marks the spot is not just a medical note — it’s an invitation. Find it. Find where the doctor located the hernia, but also find the many other places where life left its fingerprints. Pain is never only in one place.
I mix medical language, diagrams, labels, warnings — the cold way institutions talk about the body — with noise, colour, fear, and overlapping voices. Because that’s what it feels like inside my head and my gut. Too many signals at once. Too much pressure. Too much held in.
Stress doesn’t stay abstract. It burns the throat. It presses the stomach upward. It tightens the diaphragm until breathing becomes a negotiation. The body starts speaking when the mind has gone quiet.
Your guts won’t be televised is a quiet rebellion. Not all pain is visible. Not all damage is spectacular. Some suffering happens slowly, internally, while the world keeps demanding you to function as if nothing is wrong.
This painting is called Numb because there comes a moment when feeling everything becomes too much, and the body chooses silence. But numb doesn’t mean empty. It means overloaded. It means surviving.
This is not just about illness. It’s about endurance. About how the body remembers everything the soul tried to carry alone.