If he heard a voice if only 2026 – 24 x 18cm, acrylic, spray paint on canvas
The title is from Samuel Beckett’s novel How It Is, that relentless, unpunctuated text in which a figure drags itself through darkness and mud, the voice arriving in fragments from an uncertain source, existence reduced to its most basic and unsparing conditions. If he heard a voice if only: not a wish for meaning or answer or consolation, but for the minimum signal that something else exists beyond the immediate condition. The conditional doubled, if, if only, is longing stripped to its grammatical skeleton.
Something reaches upward in the grey atmosphere, drawn lines suggesting an antenna, a mast, a structure built for the purpose of transmission, trying to make contact with whatever might be above the grey.
The green right side is alive with red marks and organic traces, immediate and insistent. The lower centre churns. The small canvas holds more than its dimensions suggest it should, the compression is the condition, the smallness is the mud, the marks within it reaching toward a voice that may or may not come.
If only.