"After a 4-year break, I'm picking up my pencils again for a major large-format work (60 x 150 cm). It's an allegory about equality, or more precisely about the non-existence of equality in our societies. There's no word for it either, so I gave it a title, a neologism mixing the words Negation and Equality, giving it: "Negality".

Equality, so often promised, is an illusion denied by the very structures of our societies. Through a vertical composition, this allegory begins with a trickle of golden sand flowing from a single source, first captured by fleshy hands, symbols of insolent privilege. These hands, placed at the viewer's eye level, hold back the abundance, letting only thin streams escape through their fingers. Lower down, frail, tortured, imploring, or desperate hands struggle to grasp these crumbs, while the sand, losing its golden glow, turns a sterile gray. On the ground, in a paradoxical abundance, dying hands emerge, in a light that has become almost nonexistent, like a muffled cry from those whom inequality has reduced to a state of remnants. "Negality" confronts the viewer with an uncomfortable reality. The black background, the embodiment of nothingness, and the beam of light coming from above accentuate the hierarchical verticality, while the gradation of the sand—from brilliant gold to deathly gray—expresses the decline of hope. To see the tragic details below, the viewer must bend down, crouch, and stoop: a physical gesture that becomes a metaphor for the effort required to recognize the invisible, those buried by "negativity".

"Negality" is the counterpart to the "Freedom Raft", forming a conceptual diptych. Whereas the raft bursts with color, vibrating with a fragile hope for a coveted freedom, "Negality" sinks into austerity, denouncing the impossibility of equality in a world where resources and opportunities always accumulate at the top. This chromatic and thematic contrast - hope versus disillusionment - invites a meditation on the broken promises of humanity.

With "Negality", I wanted to create a word and an image to say the unspeakable: equality does not exist, it is denied by the hands that appropriate, by the systems that hierarchize, by the indifference that forgets those at the bottom. My work is an invitation to look where it hurts, to lower oneself to see the bare bones in the sand, to recognize that injustice is everywhere, even in abundance. By using hyperrealism, I want the viewer to feel involved, as if they were touching this sand that escapes them. Négalité does not just represent inequality, it makes it an experience. By forcing the viewer to become physically and emotionally involved, Seeing injustice is a choice, and ignoring it is complicity. What do we do with the sand that passes through our hands?..." 

Patrick Rogelet