all at once (2025) greets you first. A pair of hands presses into a face, thumbs bearing down on the eyes of Paul Atreides, the protagonist of Dune. The taupe surface of the painting holds this moment of contact—a grip both violent and intimate, a holding that takes rather than gives.

The painting draws on ancient resonances. Oedipus, too, turned his hands upon his own eyes when sight became unbearable. The parallel is not incidental: both figures sought knowledge, pushed toward revelation, and found themselves undone by what they could not unsee. The hands in Welch's painting are not those of an enemy but perhaps his own, or someone else's—it is deliberately unclear. What matters is the grip itself, the pressure applied, the refusal to let go until sight is extinguished.

This is holding as reckoning. The painting asks what we do with perception once it has shown us too much. Atreides sees futures he cannot escape; Oedipus sees a truth that shatters everything he thought he knew. Both are held captive by insight, bound to consequences they cannot release. The hands on Atreides's face might be trying to hold something in as much as keep something out—to contain the unbearable, to grip the self before it fractures entirely.

For the viewer, the painting offers no full view either. The face is obscured, the act ambiguous, the meaning suspended between violence and care. We are left holding uncertainty, forced to reckon with what we cannot quite see. The work suggests that perception is never complete, that something always escapes us, and that this incompleteness is not a failure but a condition we must learn to hold.

In the space between seeing and not seeing, between holding on and letting go, the painting waits.