Mal de amores can be understood as “a love gone wrong” — the pain that remains after loving someone who cannot stay.

I met someone in Vietnam who had returned from Berlin. At the end of that year, we fell deeply and passionately in love. For a short time, distance seemed insignificant. But when he returned to Berlin, he left me behind.

He could not accept the distance between us. Perhaps he was afraid of being hurt. Perhaps he was afraid of becoming distant. Or perhaps he simply did not have the courage to continue loving someone who could no longer be physically beside him.

The title Seroma ed Lam is a reversed form of mal de amores. A seroma is a collection of fluid that can form beneath the skin after an injury — a physical response to trauma, as the body attempts to heal itself. By reversing the phrase, I transform emotional heartbreak into a kind of bodily wound.

After a wrong love, something inside me began to break apart and slowly disappear.

But at the same time, flowers began to bloom.

The flowers surrounding the figure represent the beginning of another kind of love: the possibility of opening the heart again after being hurt. They are beautiful, but their sharpness also carries the memory of pain. Their thorns suggest that hope itself can sometimes become another source of injury.

The white streams falling through the painting resemble tears, rain, or something slowly draining from the body. They become traces of everything that could not remain.

Berlin exists in this work as an invisible presence. It is the city the person returned to, and therefore the city that became inseparable from the experience of losing him.

The painting is not about Berlin as a physical place. It is about what a city can become when someone we love disappears into it.

A place can become a wound.

And sometimes, healing begins when we finally understand that the wound is also where something new can grow.