We are not on that road anymore 2024 – 170 x 25 x 23cm, plaster, jute, canvas, oil paint, acrylic paint
A column. Or what remains of one, or what a column becomes when the institutional surface that defines it has been split open along its full vertical length to reveal what it was built around.
At 170cm this work stands at body height, which is not incidental. The plaster and jute exterior maintains the vertical authority of the architectural column, the load-bearing element, the structural given, the form that appears in every building tradition as the assertion that something above is being held up. But this column has been opened. A fissure runs its full height, irregular and organic against the hard verticality of the overall form, and through it another world is visible: a fragment of an abandoned painting, oil and acrylic worked into canvas, its greens and teals and dark ochres and traces of pink glimpsed through the split like landscape seen through a narrow crack in a wall. The painting existed before the plaster. The architecture came after. The split makes the sequence legible.
The incorporation of an abandoned painting is not incidental to the work, it is its subject. The painting was made, then set aside, then enclosed within the sculptural form, then partially revealed by the opening of that form. What the institutional surface contains is always a previous life, an earlier condition, something that was active before the enclosure and remains active within it, visible only to those who stand at the right angle and look through the gap the split allows. You cannot see the whole painting. You see what the fissure permits.
The column is also a plant. The vertical split reads simultaneously as architectural fissure and as the section through a stem, the interior of a tree or a large-stalked plant, the cambium layer exposed, the conducting tissue visible where the outer surface has been opened. The painted interior, with its greens and deep teals moving from lighter at the top toward darker and more earthen at the base, follows the logic of a plant’s interior light: the photosynthetic upper registers, the root-dark lower passages, the full vertical range of what a living column contains and circulates. The plaster and jute exterior is bark as much as it is architectural cladding, a protective surface that the interior has outgrown or that time has split.
And the column is a body. The scale insists on this: at human height, with a surface that carries the texture of skin over structure, with an interior that has been exposed rather than dissected, the work occupies the space between architecture, plant, and figure without resolving into any of them. The base, where the plaster has pooled and spread during construction, retaining the record of gravity and process, gives the column feet of a kind, an anchoring that is organic rather than engineered. It stands because it has settled into standing, not because it was designed to.
These three registers, the architectural, the botanical, the corporeal, are the same registers that organise the flower paintings with which this sculpture shares a studio, a practice, and a set of questions. The paintings place flowers in the administered spaces of the zone, the freeport, the planned surface, presences persisting in the gaps that governance leaves over, witnessing conditions they cannot change. This column is what happens when the administrative surface is opened from within: the painting inside becomes visible, the plant structure is exposed, the body that was always implied by the vertical form asserts itself through the split. The institutional exterior did not disappear. It remains, framing the opening, holding the interior in place. But it no longer presents an unbroken surface.
The title is Beckett’s, and it names an irreversible departure. A road once travelled, a present defined by the fact of having left it. The column stands at the point of that departure, the surface opened, the interior exposed, the previous wholeness retained as form while its integrity is permanently altered. We are not on that road anymore. What we are on is whatever begins at the moment the split appears and the painting inside becomes, partially, visible.