Limited edition prints
by Jérôme Lagarrigue"The street and the self are not separate territories. They are the same upheaval, at different scales."
The Riot Within takes its name from two simultaneous truths: the uprisings playing out in capital cities across the world, and the private upheavals of a life in motion — loss, grief, change, becoming. For over a decade, Jérôme Lagarrigue has painted the collision between citizen and state, drawn from press footage and rendered in oil with the gravity of the old masters. This limited print series marks a new chapter: work made from the inside out, where the political and the personal are finally named as one.
The Riot Within.
The Obligation to Look — and Feel
Humans have their own forms of internal riot and tension. Something breaks, you lose something foundational; the world reorganises itself around a gap or a void that refuses to become ordinary. The dissolution of a special relationship or partnership — produces its own confrontations, its own lines drawn and crossed, its own moments where the person you were before stands facing the person you are becoming, and neither will yield.
Lagarrigue has spent a career painting the human face as the site of everything interior — the Brooklyn Museum text described his riot paintings as garnering major attention, but his portraiture practice, from the early faces of his Red Hook Sonata to the intimate family studies that preceded Distant Relatives, has always been about what cannot be said, only seen. The face as landscape. The interior made visible.
The Riot Within extends that logic into the political. The protester's face is not merely a sociological subject — it is a mirror. The grief in that face, the fury and the love and the fear — Lagarrigue knows those from the inside now, at a level that no purely intellectual engagement with protest imagery could provide. The personal stance has become a kind of credential. A way of knowing, from the inside, what it costs to stand your ground.