New World Delusions emerged from the atmosphere of fear, uncertainty, and collective disorientation surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than depicting the crisis literally, the painting transforms it into a feverish mythological landscape in which ancient figures, religious imagery, medicine, sexuality, and human desperation collide.

At the center of this world, Pan plays his flute amid the confusion. Around him, bodies struggle, dance, recoil, and surrender to forces they cannot entirely understand. A nurse advances with a syringe, while above the scene a dark, Christ-like figure looks down upon the spectacle, his gesture suggesting judgement, disapproval, or perhaps helplessness before the disorder below.

Yet one figure moves differently. Carrying a book, he walks calmly into the chaos, seemingly absorbed in thought while the surrounding world dissolves into panic. His composure introduces another possibility: that knowledge, reflection, and imagination may offer a way of passing through collective fear without becoming entirely possessed by it.

The painting does not attempt to explain the pandemic. Instead, it remembers the psychological world that formed around it — a moment when medicine, rumor, mortality, belief, authority, and fear became entangled. The recognizable world remains present, but its logic has broken apart.

In New World Delusions, catastrophe becomes carnival and contemporary history becomes myth. What appears to be a scene of modern panic could belong equally to an ancient vision of humanity confronting forces larger than itself.