Blue Chip

2026, Oil on Italian Linen, 101.6 x 101.6cm

This work brings together three established artistic gestures to question how value is constructed and reassigned. By placing a new intervention over an already canonised image, it tests whether cultural capital accumulates through addition or becomes destabilised by it. When one recognised “blue chip” name intersects with another, value appears to circulate less through material or skill and more through reputation, authorship, and historical positioning. The added element carries its own layered references, linking Surrealist symbolism, Pop repetition, and contemporary conceptual designation.

Its transformation into finely crafted porcelain introduces another shift: a commonplace subject elevated through material and labour. The work ultimately asks whether value is inherent, cumulative, transferable - or simply reinforced by the systems that recognise and trade it.

It leaves open the possibility that improvement and defacement may, in certain contexts, be indistinguishable.