Zoloft

A drawing that confronts dependence, diagnosis, and the pharmacology of modern sadness.

Zoloft is a studio work by artist Neve, coloured pencils on black cardboard, 70 × 100 cm, created in 2013.

"Zoloft" is a colored pencil drawing on black cardboard from 2013. A woman holds a cigarette to a shattered mirror — the point of impact at the centre of her chest, cracks radiating outward like a web. Her face looks back through the fractures, refracted and multiplied, searching. The title — the name of a widely prescribed antidepressant — hangs over the image without explaining it. The broken mirror as refraction: not destruction, but the splitting of a single image into many, none of them complete, all of them true. "Zoloft" belongs to the same period as "Virgo" and marks one of the earliest appearances of the broken mirror in Neve's work — a motif that would become central to his visual language across murals, paintings and collaborations for the years to come.