When You Took the Red Pill : Original artwork by Maarten Eivind, 2025

When You Took the Red Pill

Original artwork by Maarten Eivind, 2025.

This work reflects a moment of irreversible awareness — a shift from illusion to clarity, where what is seen cannot be unseen. It is not a dramatic rupture, but a quiet, internal turning point where perception changes and reality becomes something heavier, more complex, and less forgiving.

Painted on recycled cardboard packaging, When You Took the Red Pill is a large-scale work with a raw, tactile surface and a strong industrial presence. The dominant red field creates an immediate visual intensity, while the structured repetition of forms suggests systems, patterns, and underlying frameworks — partially revealed, partially broken.

The grid-like composition can be read as fragments of architecture, surveillance, or memory — a constructed reality that begins to dissolve upon closer inspection. Within the surface, order and disruption coexist, hinting at a world that is both controlled and unstable.

The reclaimed material gives the work a distinct physical weight, while the layered surface adds depth and a sense of accumulated time. As with much of Hjertø’s work, it exists somewhere between pop art, urban decay, and psychological landscape.

Acrylic on recycled cardboard packaging

Approx. 360 × 250 cm

Ready to hang

Shipping included in the price. Delivery or collection by arrangement.