And perhaps it truly is. For many artists, the studio becomes exactly that—a space where energy is consumed without direction, where days pass without leaving anything behind. A room filled with unfinished intentions and rigid artistic identities, built more for public consumption than for interior truth.
I have chosen something else, though the choice was not conscious from the start. In the studio, I have become a sort of “SEO suveranist”: someone who refuses to optimize their gesture to be easily “found” or understood by others. I map out my own rules and refuse to justify them, even to myself. Because sometimes I feel the need to work expressionistically, to let the gesture occupy the entire paper—broad, violent, and uncensored. And in equal measure, without warning, I feel the need to return to charcoal and a simple drawing, to sit with the line and enjoy its pure pleasure, without any stakes. To an outside observer, accustomed to predictability, it might look like hypocrisy. In fact, it is exactly the opposite.
The sovereign artist is not the one who remains consistent in a single direction for the sake of the algorithm. It is the one who allows themselves to contradict themselves without becoming destabilized. This inner freedom is what justifies isolation—not the other way around. I withdraw not because I have something to hide, but because two completely different impulses coexist within me, and neither of them needs external approval or “optimized labels” to be legitimate.
Sovereign isolation thus becomes a double filter: it shields me from external noise as well as the pressure to be coherent with an image others have built for me. In the studio, I can be an expressionist for months on end and then throw it all away for a piece of charcoal and a blank sheet of paper without giving anyone an explanation. Precisely this freedom—to contradict myself in silence without the fear of being “deleted” from the index of public preferences—is what produces something real in the end.
Without it, the studio would be exactly what the title suggests. Not a creative space, but a stage where you play a fixed role, optimized for others, day after day, until nothing authentic remains. Guaranteed failure doesn’t come from isolation—it comes from rigidity. It comes from the fear of allowing yourself to be both one and the other.
