MORE CARNAGE FEATURED: JAMES MELLOR - “THE FIEND”
What if salvation and damnation were the same reflection—two sides of the same trembling face?
What if “The Fiend” was not the monster in the dark, but the quiet voice asking what you’ve become?
The Fiend XV doesn’t wait for you to look. It stares back first—unflinching, knowing. The oil-slicked surface moves like breath, alive and uneasy. Mellor’s painting is not an image but an invocation, a psychic mirror that asks the viewer to sit inside contradiction: desire and decay, faith and futility, chaos and fragile hope, all coiled in a single, feverish gesture.
The composition shifts with every glance. The figure—if we can call it that—exists in flux, neither upright nor inverted, a visual vertigo that collapses orientation itself. Eyes bloom like wounds across the canvas. Each one sees differently, each one implicates. The brushwork feels almost sculptural, built in layers of desperation and defiance. This is not the perfection of control—it’s the aftermath of survival.
In the universe of MORE CARNAGE, The Fiend XV occupies the space between confrontation and confession. It refuses moral clarity. Instead, it suggests that to live honestly within one’s contradictions is its own rebellion. Mellor’s work dares to believe that beauty can exist inside ruin—that faith, even broken, still glows in the wreckage.
This piece was chosen because it embodies the ethos of carnage without spectacle. It does not explode—it endures. Its rebellion is interior. Its violence is emotional. Its truth is the hardest kind: the one that whispers instead of screams.
ABOUT JAMES MELLOR
James Mellor is an artist working across mixed media, wire sculpture, and visual storytelling. His practice explores the intricate landscapes of the human mind—its chaos, fragility, and resilience. Rejecting perfection in favor of authenticity, Mellor’s work blurs the boundaries between control and collapse, order and emotion. Whether through painting or sculpture, he seeks to expose the raw, unquantifiable truth of human experience—where imperfection is power and vulnerability is resistance.
