A head split in two with shattered eyes and one pupil dilated, is joined by a blank mouth, open as if to call out or scream but revealing only a void. The haunted face and the painting’s title suggest the darker side of the ‘swinging sixties’ drug culture, encapsulating the experience of paranoia: anxiety, fear and distrust, a fragmenting of the self. Yet the tuber-like tentacles or plant forms that surround and unite the two sides of the head, undercut the anxiety; shaped like inverted lungs, they infuse the work with a sense of natural, organic life forms echoed in the surrounding elements.

Ribeiro’s longtime friend and fellow poet R. Parthasarathy once reflected: ‘the true subject of Lance’s paintings is, I believe, origins – Goan roots, estrangement from India, and exile in London. How does a human being come to terms with multiple histories and in the process achieve wholeness?’ This search for wholeness, and the fragmenting of the self evident in this work, perhaps also references the divisions caused by British colonial rule and India’s subsequent Partition, as well as the alienating experience of exile.