How my abstract eco-art painting maps the pressure of the Anthropocene on a fragile strip of life.
The Stranglehold is one of the smallest paintings in my eco-art research – just 40 × 40 cm, oil on canvas – and yet it feels like one of the most compressed. In this work, I reduce the world to a single point of tension: a fragile strip of life squeezed between two forms of destruction. On one side, the grey rigidity of cement and asphalt; on the other, the devouring black of fire. Between them, a fractured, restless green that tries to resist.
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| Antonino La Vela – The Stranglehold, 2025, oil on canvas, 40 × 40 cm – abstract eco-art painting on the climate crisis. |
This is not a painting of a specific landscape. It is a diagram of pressure; a visual map of how environmental collapse is produced, section by section, decision by decision. Like in my works Earth on Fire, Octopus Love and Mediterranean Dying, I use abstraction to talk about the climate crisis and the Anthropocene without painting a single tree, a single fish or a single human figure.
A fractured landscape under pressure
The centre of The Stranglehold is an explosion of green, yellow and teal triangles. They fold and collide like shards of a shattered terrain. For me, they evoke hills, fields, forests, and all the residual spaces where life still insists on existing. Inside some of these triangles, I painted tiny patterns: dots, waves, short lines. They are like the memory of leaves, seeds, microbial forms – a reminder that biodiversity often survives in the smallest, most hidden fractures of the map.
This living core is not peaceful. It vibrates, it cracks, it never settles. There are no soft contours, no romantic curves. Everything is fractured, as if the land has already been cut into plots, parcels, zones of exploitation. Even before the concrete and the fire arrive, nature is already a contested territory, divided and negotiated. That is one of the most painful truths of our time: conflict is already written into the landscape long before catastrophe becomes visible.
Cement as slow suffocation
In the upper-right section of the painting, the palette shifts abruptly to greys, whites and muted tones. Polygonal shapes suggest blocks of buildings, slabs, highway interchanges, parking lots seen from above. White dashed lines hint at road markings and borders – the typical cartographic language of human infrastructure.
These grey forms are not neutral. They lean into the green zone, cutting across it, tilting and overlapping like heavy plates sliding over a softer material. One shape contains a stylised window; another, a sort of web-like grid. They carry both the promise and the trap of urbanisation: shelter, connectivity, networks – but also confinement, enclosure and surveillance.
I chose not to paint recognisable city skylines. Instead, I use a schematic language closer to maps and urban plans. Cementification here is not just a “thing” we build; it is a mindset. It is the idea that land is primarily a surface to be subdivided, paved, optimised and monetised. The true “stranglehold” is this logic of control that seems to have no off switch.
Fire as abrupt catastrophe
On the opposite side, in the lower left, opens a deep black zone edged by a jagged band of intense red. Many viewers immediately read it as burnt land – the aftermath of a wildfire – or as a chasm created by collapse. The red border is sharp, almost graphic, like a warning sign more than a natural phenomenon.
In Earth on Fire I placed flames at the centre of the composition; here, fire is reduced to a wound, a cut on the edge of the painting. It is less spectacular, but more radical. The black area is almost mute. Where the grey sector is packed with lines and shapes, this black zone is a place where information has been erased. If concrete stands for overwriting the landscape with human order, the burnt area stands for wiping it out completely.
Between slow suffocation (cement) and abrupt catastrophe (fire), the green zone is trapped. That is exactly where I feel we are as a species: squeezed between our addiction to infrastructure and the disasters it helps to trigger.
The diagonal of siege
Compositionally, The Stranglehold is organised around a strong diagonal. The fragile green ecosystem runs diagonally between the grey concrete above and the black void below. This diagonal creates a sense of compression; the eye feels that the green is being pushed from both sides, as if the painting were physically tightening around it.
You can read this diagonal as a timeline: from the vibrant but already fractured greens, to the red line of danger, into the black aftermath of destruction. Or you can follow it in the opposite direction: from the fragile green, up into the grey architecture of control, where life is slowly replaced by regulated, hard-edged surfaces.
Either way, there is no safe centre. No neutral area where you can breathe and say “here we are fine”. Everything is in movement; everything is sliding toward damage. This is how I experience the Anthropocene: not as a distant concept, but as a permanent diagonal pressure on daily life.
A cartography of the Anthropocene
One of the things I like most in this work is how it behaves like a map without being a map of anywhere. The Stranglehold condenses global processes – deforestation, suburban sprawl, speculative real-estate development, climate-driven wildfires – into a single abstract field. The proliferation of polygons recalls satellite images and GIS maps where complex terrains are reduced to coloured sections and land-use codes.
In my research, I spend a lot of time looking at cartography, planning documents, zoning maps. They show us how what we call “nature” is already filtered through administrative categories and economic interests. In this painting, I appropriate that visual language and twist it: the map no longer serves control; it becomes evidence in an indictment. The title says it clearly. A “stranglehold” is both a physical grip and a strategy of power. Here the grip is exercised by concrete and fire, but behind them you can feel policies, markets, negligence and denial.
If you want to see how this concern for eco art and climate politics runs through my writing as well, you can explore my 2020s — AI & Eco Art index, where I collect essays on environmental art, AI art and the broader landscape of contemporary practice.
Between abstraction and accusation
I often describe my practice as “thinking in paint”. The Stranglehold is exactly that: a painted essay on crisis. Every segment, every collision of colour operates like a sentence. I do not need words or slogans on the canvas; colour and form are enough to carry the accusation.
The green triangles can be enjoyed as pure geometry, but once you understand them as fragments of a pressured ecosystem, their liveliness becomes fragile, almost tragic. Each triangle looks precarious, as if one more push from the grey plates or the advancing black would be enough to shatter the whole structure.
In this sense, The Stranglehold is part of the same line of research as works like Octopus Love and Mediterranean Dying. I am not trying to “illustrate” climate change, but to condense patterns and dynamics into abstract compositions. The goal is not just empathy for a destroyed landscape, but awareness of the logic that leads to that destruction.
The Stranglehold within my eco-art and AI research
Seen from a distance, The Stranglehold might look like a self-contained painting. In reality, it is one chapter in a much larger project that includes canvases, writing and even an artificial intelligence “soul”. In The Painting with an Artificial Intelligence Soul, I describe how I created a voice for my painting Mediterranean Dying – a first-person AI presence that speaks as the sea itself.
In that project, code and oil paint meet. Here, in The Stranglehold, the meeting happens between painting and territorial planning, between abstract composition and ecological politics. It is all the same research: how can contemporary art, and especially New European Painting, respond to an era defined by climate change, surveillance, data and systemic violence?
My answer, at least for now, is to keep painting these compressed, almost cartographic images. They are not solutions; they are tools for looking. They refuse the comfortable illusion that “awareness” alone will save us, but they do insist on clarity: this is how the pressure is built; this is where the grip tightens; this is how little space we are leaving for life.
Frequently Asked Questions about “The Stranglehold”
What is “The Stranglehold” about?
The Stranglehold is about the shrinking space where life can still exist between urbanisation and catastrophe. Concrete represents slow suffocation; fire stands for abrupt collapse. The green diagonal between them is the fragile ecosystem – and, symbolically, us.
What are the materials and dimensions?
The painting is oil on canvas, 40 × 40 cm, created in 2025. I chose this small, square format precisely to intensify the feeling of compression and siege.
How does this painting relate to “Earth on Fire”, “Octopus Love” and “Mediterranean Dying”?
All these works belong to the same eco-art research. In Earth on Fire I focus on wildfires and global warming; in Octopus Love I celebrate and defend marine life; in Mediterranean Dying I look at the collapse of an entire sea. The Stranglehold brings these concerns together into a single compressed map of pressure between land, city and fire.
Can I see or acquire “The Stranglehold”?
If you are interested in seeing the work in person, exhibiting it, or discussing acquisition, you can contact me directly via the My Art / Portfolio page or at my email address listed there. I am always open to conversations with collectors, curators and institutions who care about eco art and contemporary painting.
Related eco-art paintings and projects
If The Stranglehold resonates with you, you may also want to explore these connected works and essays on my blog: