“Cursed Tribe” is a collection that transforms the notion of identity into a site of confinement, a mythology of faces built from suppression and control. Each of the fifty portraits represents a member of a forgotten tribe, their individuality trapped behind a mask that is neither ornamental nor ceremonial, but functional.

These masks are prisons, psychic architectures designed to contain a private affliction. Within this world, identity is no longer chosen or inherited, it is imposed by the nature of one’s curse.

The visual language is austere and symbolic. The black and white palette delineates the absolute tension between the self and its containment, while the crimson, sharp and visceral, seeps through as the trace of what cannot be suppressed. Every horn, thorn, stitch, or sigil is not decoration but necessity: a fragment of an exorcism, an element of control. The mask becomes a living diagram of internal struggle, a mechanism built to hold back the uncontainable.

Each figure is defined not by a name, but by the title of their affliction: Curse of Primal Rage, Curse of the Piercing Gaze, Curse of the Silent Lament. These are not poetic metaphors but diagnoses, visible symptoms of the hidden wars that shape their existence. The archetypes, the Fox, the Jester, the Elder, the Seraph, are iterations of a shared pain, nodes in a taxonomy of suffering that belongs equally to the mythic and the human.

The portrait, in Blotter’s hands, becomes an act of confrontation. Isolated, centered, stripped of narrative, every subject demands to be faced directly. The viewer is not invited to empathize or interpret, but to endure the gaze of the mask, to meet what it conceals and what it barely contains.

“Cursed Tribe” thus operates as a mirror. Behind each mask lies not fantasy, but reflection, the image of our own disciplines and defenses, the ways we too bind our inner chaos behind acceptable forms.

In its silence, the series speaks of the tension between what we show and what we suppress, between the order we construct and the untamed pulse that insists on breaking through.