A City That Forgot the Sky

This large-scale painting stages a collision between epochs, placing a contemporary metropolis inside the visual logic of a myth that never really left us. At the center rises a colossal, unfinished tower, spiraling upward with a confidence that feels both triumphant and precarious. Its structure borrows the circular, terraced mass of Bruegel’s Tower of Babel, yet its crown pierces the sky with glass, steel, and a needle-like spire unmistakably drawn from the language of modern skyscrapers. Around it, familiar urban silhouettes cluster tightly together, their facades compressed into a dense architectural chorus, as if the city itself has been pulled inward by the tower’s gravitational ambition. The river in the foreground acts as both stage and witness: boats glide past scaffolding, workers haul stone and timber, and small human figures repeat gestures of labor that feel timeless, almost ritualistic. The palette leans toward warm ochres, muted blues, and weathered greys, giving the entire scene a patina of age, as though this future city has already become an artifact. Nothing here feels frozen; the air is busy, slightly hazy, full of motion and intent, and yet the sky above remains oddly indifferent, expansive, and calm. The painting reads as a quiet but pointed meditation on progress, scale, and human ambition, suggesting that every era rebuilds the same tower with new materials and new names, convinced, once again, that this time it might finally reach the heavens.