Leeches, from the Daros Suite by Jean-Michel Basquiat centres on a dissected head — red, mechanically connected to the surrounding image through lines and arrows — while the rest of the work fills with the language of parasitic extraction and biological depletion. Roaches, parasites, boric acid, and dehydration crowd the image alongside POWER + MONEY (VALUE) WITHOUT NOBILITY, boxed and repeated, and a diagram of the heart at the base. The sentence that begins at the top of the image trails off before it can finish.

The medical history of leeches runs directly into the political history Basquiat was examining across the Daros Suite. Bloodletting through leeches was the dominant therapeutic intervention in Western medicine for centuries — a practice premised on the idea that the body's problems could be solved by removing what it contained, applied disproportionately to the poor and to the enslaved, whose bodies were available for medical experimentation in ways that others were not. POWER + MONEY (VALUE) WITHOUT NOBILITY is a precise description of that arrangement — extraction dressed as treatment, value flowing in one direction while the depleted body is left to manage the consequences.

Basquiat was reading widely across history, medicine, and economics in 1982, and Leeches is the Daros Suite work that brings those three subjects into the most direct contact. The dissected head at the centre is neither a portrait nor a diagram — it is a figure caught inside a process that is analysing and consuming it simultaneously, the arrows connecting it to the surrounding image pointing in both directions, the distinction between treatment and extraction left deliberately open.

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