Something beautiful emerges when you put two full-grown, half-naked humans in a locked cage and have them fight for money and the entertainment of a drunken crowd.

The boundaries start to blur between aggression and intimacy, discipline and chaos. Punches aren’t about knocking people out, but distortion and the evidence of impact . Submissions are less about defeat than the interaction of limbs, tangled not just in combat but in a choreography of collapse. The cage becomes a gallery, a space of introspection and contemplation, where bodies perform, break, and ultimately dissolve into abstraction. Violence is aesthetic, almost tender. Is tender. Is soft.

These are paintings of human bodies in direct, violent conflict and the beauty of the results.

I started this project in 2012. I was watching a lot of combat sports stuff (mostly MMA), and made a bunch of reference images in Photoshop from my favorite combat moments. Painted mostly in Artrage, and eventually repainted in Rebelle, which has become my favorite painting software.