| Penitent reimagines Saint Longinus—the Roman soldier who pierced Christ’s side and later converted—as a digital icon of remorse and transformation. Rendered in saturated red, the classical sculpture stands in dramatic posture, spear in hand, arm extended. Traditionally a symbol of spiritual awakening, Longinus is here transposed into a server room, surrounded by numbered network ports and infrastructural logic. The battlefield is no longer Golgotha—it’s the data center.
Overlaid across the composition are emojis: smiling faces with halos, purple and yellow devils. These glyphs replace traditional iconography, flattening spiritual complexity into digital reaction. The scarf becomes a wearable catechism of emoji theology, where repentance is signaled, not lived.
In the context of New Morality, Penitent critiques the collapse of spiritual depth into digital shorthand. Longinus stands not in a temple but in a system of surveillance and transmission. The spear remains, but the divine connection is rerouted through fiber optics and emotional compression.
Printed on polychiffon, the work gains a softness that belies its structural tension. Light passes through the statue, the cables, the emojis—revealing a fragile architecture of belief, guilt, and grace.
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