I Don’t Wanna Go Until You See Everything You Lose When You Backstab Me

acrylic drawing on canvas, 25 x 25 x2 cm, Anton Teriev, 2025

From No Time For Losers seriеs (2019-)

Photo: © the artist
Courtesy the artist

Anton Terziev’s acrylic‑pen drawing I Don’t Wanna Go Until You See Everything You Lose When You Backstab Me (from the No Time For Losers series) channels the spectator’s bloodlust through a bold, kinetic portraiture. Layers of neon and earth‑tone hatch marks carve out a visage that seems both punched and propped—its warped features echo the vicious choreography of MMA bouts. Against a jarring black ground, the frenetic strokes pulse like the thrum of an arena, where every blow is amplified by a roaring crowd.
Terziev deftly subverts the glamour of combat sport by exposing its underbelly: the collective craving for brutality and the erosion of empathy in our hyper‑aggressive society. The subject’s half‑lidded stare arrests us with uncomfortable complicity, reminding viewers that, in cheering each knockout, we feed a darker hunger. Through expressive color and mercurial line work, the artist invites a reckoning: at what cost do we celebrate violence as entertainment?

fotoimage used: Denis Lebedev - a Russian professional boxer

Could You Make It So Personal You Would Be Embarrassed to Hear it? (2)

acrylic drawing on canvas, 25 x 25 x 2 cm, Anton Terziev 2025

From No Time For Losers seriеs (2019-)

Photo: © the artist
Courtesy the artist

Anton Terziev’s Could You Make It So Personal You Would Be Embarrassed to Hear It? commands attention through its bold use of acrylic markers and its uncanny sculptural presence. The close‑up of a cauliflower ear—rendered in pulsating strokes of magenta, teal, and amber against a velvety black ground—transforms a scarred testament to violence into something embryonic, tender, almost primordial. Each flick of the marker seems to trace both cartilage and cell membrane, collapsing the brutality of the octagon into the quiet mystery of human genesis.

Terziev’s layering of brash, almost fluorescent hues over deep shadows creates a tension between exposure and concealment. The ear’s ridges writhe like nascent life, inviting us to reconsider what we regard as injury or otherness; the piece suggests that our capacity for violence and vulnerability are inseparable in the making of our bodies. In its economy of form and intensity of color, the work strikes a provocative balance between visceral realism and speculative biology, urging viewers to confront how the traces of conflict might also bear the seeds of renewal.

fotoimage used: MMA, UFC star Sean Strickland's cauliflower ear