A little less of no matter what no matter 2026 – 28 x 20,5cm, acrylic, spray paint, wire on canvas
The painting has the colour of illuminated signage, the city after dark when artificial light replaces natural light and familiar things take on a slightly unreal chromatic register. In this light the dark impasto forms crouching in the lower left are not topiary, they are presences, the shapes that plants become when recognition becomes uncertain. The teal form descending from the upper edge is not liquid, it is something alive and moving at the hour when the neon is on and the garden belongs to whatever inhabits it after dark.
In the green panel to the left, a kind of doubling of the central flower takes place. Not identical, not quite, but recognisably the same entity in a different condition: the doppelgänger appearing in the synthetic neon light while its counterpart occupies the darkness. The painting holds both simultaneously without resolving which is the original and which is the shadow.
Along the base, a fluorescent orange shape extruded like sealant along a joint that won’t quite close, a sythetic-like element in a practice moving steadily toward the geological and the organic, insisting on itself with complete indifference to whether that is appropriate. Beside it, a rose in the same material: the series’ founding image rendered in neon, the flower that began as a refugee and has arrived, no matter what no matter, here.
The neon stays on. The nocturnal creatures continue their business in the green light. The doppelgänger watches from the other side of the white divide, neither more nor less real than what it doubles.