Roland Carter — Etamos (2024)
100 × 160 cm | Acrylic on Canvas

“What has to be made has to be made; we can die plenty of times while we are alive.”

Etamos is a meditation on death, renewal, emotional truth, and the continuous transformation of the self. Rather than approaching death solely as the end of physical existence, the work considers the many forms of death that occur within a single lifetime — the ending of identities, relationships, beliefs, desires, and former versions of ourselves.

Throughout the composition, circles become recurring symbols of different lives and different renewals of the soul. Their cyclical form suggests that existence is not simply a linear movement from beginning to end, but a succession of completions and beginnings. Something dissolves so that something else can emerge. In this sense, physical death is presented not as something to fear, but as another form of completion within a much larger cycle.

Through layered passages of colour, gesture, repetition, and movement, Carter creates a visual field in which states appear to emerge, disappear, and reorganize. The painting resists a single fixed reading. Like consciousness itself, its forms seem capable of holding multiple histories at once — traces of what has been, what is present, and what is still becoming.

At the emotional core of Etamos is an insistence on living truthfully. Do not conceal sadness beneath an appearance of happiness. Do not perform strength when you are hurting, or construct an identity simply to satisfy the expectations of others. To continually live against one's inner truth is to create a separation between the life being experienced and the life being presented.

Within the work, this emotional honesty becomes another form of death and rebirth. To acknowledge what we genuinely feel can mean allowing an old identity to collapse. Yet that collapse also creates the possibility of renewal. The self is therefore not presented as something permanent, but as a living system — continuously responding, adapting, shedding, remembering, and becoming.

The circles of Etamos can consequently be read as more than symbols of individual lives. They become thresholds: passages between emotional states, identities, memories, and forms of consciousness. Each ending contains the conditions for another beginning.

Etamos ultimately asks us to reconsider what it means to die and what it means to live. We may experience many deaths before the physical body reaches its final one. The challenge is not to avoid these transformations, but to pass through them without abandoning the truth of who we are.

To live fully is to accept transformation. To let something end when it has ended. To feel what is truly felt. And to allow the soul, again and again, to become.

Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Dimensions: 100 × 160 cm
Year: 2024
Artist: Roland Carter
Status: Sold
Collection: Private Collection, Bali, Indonesia