Like a film noir detective, suspicious and flawed, navigating the complex maze-like alienation of an assumed normalcy I exhume commercial images, unearthing the “femme fatale” of “branding” imagery that sells people, products, publicity, and public relations. Reassembling the initial idealized image (such as a cover of a Vogue Magazine or a holiday greeting card) via askew visual proportions and cockeyed narratives fashions an unmasking of the tangled maze of a commercial hypnotic sensuality. This transforms the manipulative experience into one that reveals (a painting), which by its nature challenges the initial usage. The resulting painting coalesces into visual concomitant mystery, incompleteness, and un-canniness; a visual triad that connotes a conundrum of being, “a being in the world” resistant and abrasive to the calculated complex simplicity of an encompassing mass media that feigns a comprehensiveness. This painting process whittles away at initial formal/conceptual certainties, leading to ambiguity and uncertainty; the ensuing aesthetic awareness assumes (rather than avoids) the traumatic encounters with the inconsistencies of reality. Coupled, overlaying, and parallel, and therefore an intimation of a political unmasking is the following narrative perspective: how the general reception/acceptance of economic order is subtly maintained and reproduced internally (psychologically) through image inference/manipulation, more so than externally by political (re)organization, or for that matter brute force. Painting awry un-conceals visual naivety which internalizes the “pretty pictures” of numerous utopias of commerce (celebrity(ism), beauty and fashion, pornography, consumerism, corporatization, privatization, just to name a few). Such un-conceals the abyss between experience and primary cultural pictures, images that promote and cajole, rather than be.