The Influence Machine conceives of subjectivity not as an autonomous origin, but as the result of a systemic network of forces that operate from childhood and extend throughout social life. The self is not constructed in isolation, but within a field of influences where family, education, economic structures, imaginaries of success, politics, and cognitive capitalism actively participate in its configuration.

The portraits, half child, half adult, place the origin of this process in the early years of life, a decisive period in the formation of personality and the psychic frameworks from which the individual will learn to perceive themselves, to desire, and to act. Childhood does not appear here as a nostalgic territory, but as a structural archive, "The place where emotional patterns, value narratives, and adaptive mechanisms are inscribed that will later be reactivated in adulthood."

As individuals move from the intimate center to the social fabric, these early learning experiences enter into dialogue, and sometimes conflict, with broader systems of power. Some individuals are not only shaped by the machine, but come to embody it, becoming figures capable of producing and directing subjectivity on a large scale. Power is not presented as an individual anomaly, but as continuity: "The machine reproduces itself when those who were formed by it go on to operate as its active symbols."

However, this continuity finds a breaking point in our historical event, and "The Conflict" emerges. In the series "The Unresolved Emotion," the conflict in Ukraine introduces a dimension where structure ceases to be theory and becomes concrete violence. The series presents portraits of the presidents involved, depicted in their dual child-adult condition, shifting the focus of reflection toward our contemporary global dimension. The question is no longer simply how the self is formed, but how these psychic formations unfold and participate in decisions that affect millions of lives.

Here, childhood reappears not as a reductive explanation, but as an uncomfortable question: what narratives, what imaginaries of nation, power, or threat are inscribed early on and reappear amplified in the exercise of political power? War reveals the tension between the psychic and the structural. Individual subjectivity, far from dissolving into the system, becomes one of its most determining vectors.

From a psychopolitical perspective, the series highlights how contemporary leadership operates within a framework of symbols, discourses, and memories that exceed personal will.

Technically, hyperrealism functions as an ambiguous strategy: it seduces through its technical precision, yet introduces a latent unease. Visual pristine imagery does not seek neutrality; it reproduces the language of the very system it represents. The discomfort emerges in the fissure between the flawless image and the question it poses.

Continuity, then, is neither closed nor deterministic. Childhood is origin, but also potential and ambivalence. There is neither explicit condemnation nor implicit absolution. The painting offers neither solutions nor redemptions; it exposes the architecture that articulates desire, ambition, fear, and authority. Faced with conflict, the work does not explain: it confronts.

The question remains open:
Does childhood define us?
And if it does, how does that determination transform when the subject occupies a position from which he can shape the collective destiny?

The answer is not in the image, but in the experience of the observer, and it is in that space of tension where the work is completed.