Before it’s one or the other or it’s both 2026 – 27,5 x 20,6cm, acrylic, spray paint, pencil, watercolour on paper
The title is Beckett’s, and it names a condition that most art practices spend their energy resolving: the moment before categories have settled, before the mark has declared itself as one thing or another, before the work has decided what it is. Beckett holds that moment open as a place of genuine possibility. So does this work on paper.
The medium enforces what the title describes. Spray paint, watercolour, pencil, acrylic, four languages operating simultaneously on the same sheet, none of them deferred to the others, none of them waiting for permission.
The lower right is the sheet’s most urgent passage: a triangular garden of magenta, red, pink, green, orange, brown, the full chromatic vocabulary of the flower series compressed into a field that has been drawn, painted, sprayed, and scrawled in a single sustained act. Roses are described as spiralling pencil rotations, three or four turns of a line that captures the flower’s essential structure without describing it. It is one or the other or both.
On the left edge, a mass of heavily applied teal acrylic anchors the composition with the material weight the recent paintings have been developing, the same corporeal-geological presence that has been accumulating across the canvases, here translated into the faster, more provisional register of works on paper. It sits against the spray ground with the authority of something that insisted on being more present than its surroundings without explaining why.