Are they in the same situation? 2026 – 200 x 160cm, oil and acrylic on canvas
The title is from Beckett’s novel How It Is, and it poses its question across a physical gap, the off-white seam between two panels that share a world until they don’t.
The painting is a vanitas or the vanitas updated for conditions the seventeenth century could not have anticipated. The dark warm ground, the abundance of fully described blooms, the specificity of each species holding its position with complete autonomy: this is the tradition the series has always maintained a dialogue with, here at its most direct. Roses, ranunculus, gerbera, chrysanthemum, blue anemone, allium, each distinct, each present with the full weight of individual existence, the collective abundance of the Dutch flower piece carried into a canvas that knows what the Dutch flower piece did not: that the ground the flowers grow in is no longer a given.
Into this abundance, from the lower right, a flat terracotta triangle. The administrative surface arriving without announcement, the cleared ground of the development site, the zone designation made chromatic.
The flowers do not stop at the lines. Some cross from one panel to the other through the gap between them. Some are cut by the white diagonals without acknowledgment. The abundance continues in the only direction available to it, further into the canvas, closer to the boundary.
Are they in the same situation? The left panel and the right panel share their world completely, the same ground, the same flowers, the same darkness, until the diagonal arrives. Then they are not. The question the painting asks it also answers, once, at the moment the line is drawn, after which the answer cannot be undone.