Perfect Enough

2025, Oil and Embroidery on Canvas, 120 x 100cm

Finalist, The Fisher’s Ghost Art Prize 2026 Finalist, The Naked and Nude Art Prize 2025

This painting reimagines Emilio Fiaschi’s marble nymph, her classical form interrupted by an embroidered tattoo: a mortal mark imposed upon an image of immortal perfection. The work considers our compulsion to alter, personalise and “improve” what is already regarded as sublime, exposing the insecurity beneath the gesture.

By bringing classical idealism into contact with contemporary intervention, the painting sets permanence against fashion, restraint against self-display, and inherited beauty against the modern demand to curate identity. The tattoo becomes both embellishment and intrusion: a signature placed where none is required.

In an age of Instagram filters, cosmetic enhancement and constant self-revision, the nymph’s stillness throws our own restlessness into relief. Her apparent perfection is not enough to prevent further alteration. The work asks whether such interventions genuinely elevate the self, or merely reveal our inability to accept beauty without modifying it, branding it, or making it our own.