How end? 2026 – 50 x 40cm, acrylic on canvas
The title comes from Samuel Beckett’s prose piece Worstward Ho, that late, stripped, inexhaustible prose text in which language tries to fail its way toward something it cannot name. “How end?” is not a question about whether things end, or when. It is a question about procedure: by what mechanism, through what administrative logic, does ending occur? The painting holds two structural answers in simultaneous suspension, and, within the darkness between them, a third possibility neither mechanism anticipated.
Two hard-edged systems compete for the canvas without resolving into each other. On the left, a dark red outline constructs an architectural elevation, faceted, schematic, the profile of a modernist structure whose institutional purpose has lapsed. A jungle has grown into it. Dense black impasto fills its interior, built up and worked over, and within that darkness flowers are embedded, not standing in front of the ruin but surviving inside it, their forms partly consumed by the matter surrounding them. Among them, at the centre of the darkest passage, a single yellow bloom burns with a luminosity that the surrounding black makes absolute. It is not decorative. It is evidence: that something persists inside the consumed space, that the ruin has not completed its work.
On the lower right, a different geometry asserts itself in flat cyan blue, a black diagonal, a pale band, the colour language of infrastructure, of wayfinding, of the managed civic surface. This is the chute: operational, purposeful, its function legible and its activation merely deferred. Where the ruin on the left registers an ending that has already occurred gradually and without announcement, the chute proposes an ending that has been formally prepared for but not yet enacted. Two mechanisms, two timescales, two administrative logics of termination.
Between them and beyond them, on the right side of the canvas, the garden continues in full light, yellow flowers rising and scattering against the pale ground, looser and more numerous than the single bloom burning in the darkness to the left. The yellow inside the ruin and the yellow outside it are the same colour, the same species almost, connected across the compositional divide by a chromatic rhyme that is the painting’s quiet insistence: the flower in the dark and the flower in the light are not different flowers. They are the same witness, in radically different conditions.
The flowers in my paintings persist not because persistence is heroic but because it is what remains when everything else has been tried.