What makes us human? Is it our intelligence, our self-awareness, our ability to use tools? Or is it our emotions that govern us, that part of us that’s been with us from the early stages of evolution – a part that’s often referred to as our ‘lizard brain’?
We turn on the television or doomscroll on our phones, and we see war, famine and destruction from around the world. It feels like the emotional side is winning. Painter Cristina Starr leans into this and asks us to question how logical and intelligent we can be to leave such pain in our wake. Was philosopher Thomas Hobbes right when he said life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”?
Starr explores both sides of the emotional equation with a violent depiction of a bird feeding a man’s genitals to its offspring and another man in a tender embrace with an alien-like figure. Its many eyes remind me of Jeremy Bentham’s concept of the panopticon, and it has been realised in what Shoshana Zuboff refers to as the age of surveillance capitalism, where our phones and cameras track our every move, and tailored advertising often feels as if it knows us better than we know ourselves. It begs the question: has technology freed or enslaved us?
In two of her latest works, ‘Tower’ and ‘Ghost of Boy with Baby Bird’, we see isolated children while violence occurs all around them. It reminds us that it’s often the most vulnerable who suffer in times of war, even if the amount of agency they have is limited or non-existent. The ones who look to us to protect them, and yet we feel powerless as we witness their suffering from thousands of miles away. As the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once said, “When the rich wage war, it’s the poor who die”.
The child in the tower brings to mind Ursula Le Guin’s short story ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, which lays out a utopia in which everyone’s happiness depends on the misery of a single child. Just as the citizens in this story accept this child’s misery, it often feels like we’re in a similar world where much of the population, while shocked, continues as is after witnessing the suffering of children worldwide.
The style of the paintings reminds me of Edvard Munch at his most expressive, with a touch of the surreal we see in William Blake’s work. The emotion in each work is palpable, ensuring we feel the full impact of Starr’s powerful and topical paintings.
While the works are uncomfortable to look at, it’s important that we’re confronted with these hard truths as we view them, with both works on display in the group show EXI 26 at the Crypt Gallery in London, running from February 4-8. Cristina Starr isn’t showing us the world we want to see, but the one we need to know about.
You can find more about Cristina Starr’s work through her website and Instagram.
She will have a solo exhibition of her work opening August 1 2026, at Art and Talking Gallery in Chipping Norton.
