Inspired by Nellie Bly's journalistic report “Ten days in a madhouse "(1887), the painting is an attempt to explore with the imagination the inside of the mind, where the healthy rational and the pathological irrational coexist in every human being. The context is a kind of box, a dilapidated building that recalls the fragile physical and mental constructions behind which we barricade ourselves and which give us the illusion of being able to live cutting out the surrounding world and all its problems. The plunge has a double meaning: that of the "abyss" of the mind - still a mystery today not fully clarified - and the autobiographical one, because it’s me the swimmer diving and having experienced the sensation in the past of having to protect my true self from those who, seeing only the outer skin, tried to convince me that I was no longer in control of my thoughts and wishes.
