This series revisits the British urban legend of the 1980s: reproductions of paintings of crying children, accused of bringing bad luck, were burned en masse to ward off misfortune. Mesaros uses charcoal, ashes, and lampblack—materials born from fire—to resurrect these cursed images. Hyperrealistic portraits emerge from a cloud of soot, tears become black and thick. The tension between technical mastery and liquid accident inscribes the work in a double reading: an attempt to create memory and simultaneous impediment. By reactivating this decried iconography, the artist questions the power of representations and the narratives we project onto them.

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