Narcissus

Narcissus looks into the void — a companion drawing to the mural on the Navigli barge.

Narcissus is a studio work by artist Neve, coloured pencils on black cardboard, created in 2014.

"Narcissus" is a pencil drawing on black cardboard from 2014 — the studio work behind the mural of the same name painted on a barge on the Navigli in Milan that same year. The figure leans over a broken mirror, both hands reaching down into the shattered glass, her reflection caught and fragmented in the cracks below. The composition is closer and darker than the mural: no canal, no city, no context — only the figure and the mirror and the black of the cardboard that surrounds them both. The drawing belongs to the same cluster of works from this period — alongside Zoloft and the Narcissus mural — in which the broken mirror becomes a central motif in Neve's visual language: not destruction, but the moment in which a single image splits into many, none of them complete.