Am I in a Truman Show?

Untitled 2025: A Silent Anatomy of Collapse

Antonino La Vela - Untitled 2025

First work in the series “Am I in a Truman Show?”

In a time when the world appears to be collapsing in real time, through wars, climate disaster, digital disconnection, and moral fatigue, Untitled 2025 marks the beginning of a new artistic direction for me. It is the first work in a larger, evolving series titled Am I in a Truman Show?, which seeks to examine the gap between perception and reality in a society increasingly desensitized to suffering.

This series was born from a deep sense of confusion and urgency. Like many, I was overwhelmed by the constant stream of violence on our screens, each tragedy framed by competing narratives, distorted language, and endless commentary. I began by asking a simple but disturbing question: What is really happening to us?

When I posed this question publicly, I didn’t receive answers. I received ideological positions, headlines, and slogans, phrases that sounded rehearsed. Some said, “It’s justified.” Others, “It’s monstrous.” Discussions about colonialism, resistance, terrorism, and political legitimacy all overlapped and cancelled each other out. Names like Trump, Hamas, Putin, Zelensky, Netanyahu, and Ayatollahs were thrown around like team names in a global sport where everyone has picked a side, but no one watches the actual game anymore.

Then something important happened. Amid the flood of reactions, I received a direct, thoughtful message that forced me to pause. It read:

“Thank you so much for your message.

I like your proposition, but I need to say that this is not a conflict. It is a colonial project. When you say conflict, it means you accept the occupation.”

“There’s nothing to say. They’re animals. They should be wiped out.”

This short message cut through everything else. It reminded me that even language, if misused or diluted, can become complicit in distortion. To call it a “conflict” might seem neutral, but neutrality can become a form of erasure, especially when power is unbalanced and history is ignored.

From that moment on, I stopped searching for clarity in words. I started painting instead.

The Work

Untitled 2025 is a triptych composed of three 22 x 22 cm panels. It was created using oil on canvas paper and is framed in three separate black structures. One of the frames contains a handwritten note, hidden, but intentionally placed. It reads:

No names. No borders. No answers.

The structure of the triptych is essential to its meaning:

The left panel features two veiled girls, motionless, caught in a state of resignation. Their agency has been removed; decisions about their lives have been made elsewhere.

Antonino La Vela - Untitled 2025 1/3

The right panel mirrors the composition with two children—still untouched, but symbolically positioned as inheritors of the same fate.

Antonino La Vela - Untitled 2025 2

The center panel is nearly blank, with a single red mark. This mark is not a symbol to be decoded. It is simply what it is: a rupture. Blood. Silence. A space where meaning collapses.

Antonino La Vela - Untitled 2025 3/3

The color palette, deliberately minimal, echoes the colors of the Palestinian flag:

- Red for violence and interruption

- Green for a life that is slowly receding

- Black for historical erasure

- White for the illusion of peace

The simplicity of the composition is a response to the exhaustion of over-intellectualized discourse. This painting does not aim to explain. It refuses to resolve. It asks the viewer to experience, not interpret.

Antonino La Vela - Untitled 2025 Framed

Artistic Context and Series Vision

This piece is part of a broader series titled Am I in a Truman Show? The title draws inspiration from the surreal, controlled environment in Peter Weir’s film The Truman Show, where reality is manufactured and curated for the benefit of the audience.

I believe this metaphor now applies painfully well to our global condition. We live in an era where atrocities are live-streamed, curated by algorithms, and instantly buried beneath the next trend. Empathy has become a resource we ration. Tragedy is consumed passively, often through sanitized euphemisms such as “collateral damage,” “acceptable losses,” or “targeted response.”

Untitled 2025 is not the culmination of the series, it is its beginning. The series will continue to explore the emotional, political, and existential implications of this mediated, distorted world, using painting as a way to return to raw human perception.

Antonino La Vela - Untitled 2025 Back

The Hidden Voice Inside the Work

Concealed inside one of the frames is a handwritten note, invisible to the viewer, yet integral to the soul of the work.

It reads:

- No names.

- No borders.

- No answers.

This work does not seek to explain, but to echo.
It carries the silence of cities reduced to dust,
the weight of childhoods interrupted,

and the quiet resilience that still resists erasure.

It asks whether human dignity, legal truth, and political will still move together, or whether we now live in a world where they dangerously diverge.

This is not a message.
This is not a warning.

It is a witness.

A fragment, preserved, for those who still believe that art must speak when the world forgets to listen.

The Hyde Letter

End

I hesitated before showing Untitled 2025, not because I feared critique, but because I understand what it means to expose certain truths in certain places. In today’s climate, clarity can be controversial. Naming occupation, recognizing structural violence, or exposing hypocrisy can easily be labeled “radical” or “biased.”

But I chose to show it because silence is no longer an option.

This work may not be exhibited. It may not be sold. It may not be celebrated. But that doesn’t matter.

What matters is that it exists—and it speaks.
Without compromise.
Without filter.

But ultimately, I could not remain silent.

What value has art if it is afraid of its own truth?

Untitled 2025 does not serve ideology.

It exists because silence is no longer bearable.

A Mirror to Our Broken Civilization

This triptych refuses to offer answers.

It refuses to assign guilt.

It refuses to simplify tragedy into binary sides.

Instead, it offers a painful mirror:

- Where empathy collapses under ideology.

- Where truth dissolves into power struggles.

- Where dignity becomes negotiable.

- Where children’s bodies become numbers.

And it asks:

Can human dignity, legal truth, and political will still walk together?

Or have they already parted ways, perhaps forever?

Why “Untitled”? The Ethics of Naming

To name this work would be to domesticate it.

To give it a title would risk aestheticizing suffering.

And these wounds resist all forms of classification.

- Series: Am I in a Truman Show?

- Artist: Antonino La Vela

- Year: 2025

- Format: Triptych

- Medium: Oil on canvas paper

- Framing: Three independent black , embedded with handwritten note inside the frame

- Dimensions: cm 22 x 22 each frame