A figure that fuses Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck with the body of a Greek sculpture, bleached almost entirely white, stands out against a wall covered in graffiti. The light that reaches it is the light of dawn, pink on the ears and face, yet so strong that it dissolves the volume instead of defining it: the outlines soften, the ground turns into a white blur and the wall recedes in grey bands. Across that washed-out surface, fine red and yellow scratches cut through the image like flaws on the retina.
The title comes from Placebo’s song of the same name, about the hour when someone comes home after a night without sleep while the rest of the city gets up for work. That is the painting’s point of view: tired eyes that no longer focus, dazzled by the morning. Two of the most reproduced characters in mass culture, grafted onto the classical canon, appear half erased, less an image than a residue: the mark left on the eye after seeing them too many times.
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