With Essential Personnel (2024), Jonathan Viner gathers and transforms this long-standing iconographic narrative. The protagonist of his work is a man of the present day: an urban worker who bears the signs of modernity but reinterprets them with style and awareness. His warm, luminous sand-colored suit breaks the dominance of black—it is a garment that speaks of openness, of a rediscovered balance between life and work, between productivity and well-being.

The dark sunglasses, badge, sports bag, and takeaway coffee are details that construct a complex and authentic identity: that of a man who maintains his individuality even while immersed in the machinery of the city. But it is the colors and the composition that reveal the most poetic dimension: Viner’s man is surrounded by lush plants, by foliage that invades the workspace, and by birds in flight that seem to suggest lightness, freedom, and dream.

The floor glows with pink and orange tones; the reflections of sunset stream through the windows. The city is transformed into an inner landscape—a place where masculinity can finally embrace its more sensitive, creative, and imaginative side. In Essential Personnel, the man is no longer enslaved by the dark suit as armor of power, but becomes a bearer of a new elegance—one made of softness, harmony, and the courage to redefine himself.

Viner offers us a manifesto of contemporary masculinity: a man who dares to dream without abandoning practicality, who seeks a new balance between his productivity and an authentic desire for well-being and beauty.