Must have Been some hour of the night 2026 – 40 x 50cm, acrylic, spray paint on canvas
The title is Beckett’s, a reconstruction from aftermath, the hour known only by inference. Something happened, and it must have been at night, at the hour when the world had stopped watching, and this is what the morning finds: a large flat platform hovering over a swamp, its shadow pressing down on a world it dominates without touching.
The orange platform occupies the upper half of the canvas with the aggressive flatness of high-visibility infrastructure, the colour of warning, of civic surfaces designed to be noticed and obeyed. It does not rest on the canvas. A grey shadow plane beneath it creates genuine spatial ambiguity: the platform floats, hovering over the world below with the particular authority of things that are large, administrative, and overhead. It casts its shadow without entering what it shadows. The gap between the platform’s underside and the ground below is where the painting’s central drama occurs, the zone of unregulated space, the area the administrative surface dominates without governing, where what the platform produces accumulates unseen.
What it has produced is the lower half of the painting: a swamp. Green, yellow, black, the marks of contamination moving through the canvas with the energy of something that has been growing in shadow for some time. Dark threads swirl through waterlogged ground, suggesting roots and oil simultaneously, the kind of mark that appears in aerial photography of industrial run-off or ecological disaster, organic in form, catastrophic in implication.
Along the platform’s ledge, a row of flowers witnesses this from above. They are not calm witnesses. Ghost-like marks surround them, agitating the table surface and their own edges, the painterly residue of what witnessing produces in the witness, the disturbance that comes from looking steadily at something the platform’s language insists is being cleaned up.
The phrase “draining the swamp” entered political language as a promise of purification, the removal of corruption, the clearing of contaminated ground. The painting knows what the phrase conceals: that the platform hovering above the swamp is the mechanism of its production, that the shadow cast by administrative power is precisely the condition under which contamination flourishes, that the swamp is not what the platform was built to replace but what the platform was built to sustain, at the hour when no one was watching, at whatever hour that must have been.
The flowers on the ledge look down. The swamp glows below them. The platform hovers between, casting its shadow, touching nothing.