SERIES 'Without Madonna:Tim Draws Back'

a project by Tim and Jimmy

Horizontal attachment is a ghost in the room—unseen and ignored, yet devastating.

The Hollow Bond

In the 1960s, children raised by the state were stripped of all domestic warmth and warehoused in silence - as in a psychological death. Within those cold walls, comfort was a forbidden language. Denied the guidance of an adult’s hand, toddlers  turned to each other in a desperate choreography of survival- not seldom designed by the institute as a form of 'therapy'. This is horizontal attachment in groups: while the natural bond between child and elder severed,  it was replaced by a deep attachment to same sex peers and infants. It is a survival mechanism that rewrites the soul’s blueprint for life.

The State as a Gaslighting Machine
The ultimate cruelty is not just the theft of love, but the refusal of accountability. The system refuses to recognize the trauma it manufactured. Instead, it labels the wounded in later life as "deviant," "weird" or even "dangerous." This is the second betrayal and secondary victimization:  the State designs the tragedy, then condemns the victims for the very scars it forced them to grow.  In this world, the desperate act of surviving state neglect is treated as a crime. 

The Project: Drawing Back
Mixed media on oil paint paper, 30 x 40 cm. Outlines in Neocolor oil pastel by Tim; mixed media [ink, bister ink, pan pastel, oil pastel, ink pen, and varnish] by Jimmy, 2026 .

This portfolio is the voice of Tim, a three-year-old co-identity. The work  is based on images  of  the "Holy Madonna"—the Old Masters’ symbol of the most sacred, unbreakable love between mother and child. But for Tim, this bond was shattered by the State, imposed to seek love and touch with peers.

Tim cannot fight the system with words, but he can "draw back." In each piece, the divine is interrupted. He captures the desperate search for intimacy among the forgotten, while simultaneously crossing out the Holy Mother. It is an unholy world rendered in ink and oil, where the search for love becomes an act of quiet, visual rebellion.

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