The title of the work is inspired by the song "Berlin" by Lou Reed.

For decades, the city of Berlin was the embodiment of a wall, a geometric, political, absolute structure, covered on its western side with graffiti, messages, colors, and individual desires projected onto the concrete. The wall as a pure form of power and separation; the traces as a human, fragile, and stubborn response to this coldness.

"Berlin" is an almost bare piece, piano and voice, a tender and weary evocation—"In Berlin, by the wall, you were five foot ten inches tall"—where the grand narrative of history (the city divided in two) serves as a mere backdrop to a shattered intimacy. In Reed's work, as in my painting, the form is the cold container; what is inscribed within it—the voice that breaks, the color that flows—is the lived experience.