So many words so many lost 2026 – 40 × 30cm, acrylic, spray paint on canvas
The title is from Beckett’s 1961 novel How It Is, and it names a specific kind of loss: not the failure to find words but the failure of words that were found, produced, released, and did not arrive. So many words. So many lost. The gap between the saying and the receiving, the mark made and not read, the flower placed and not seen.
The painting is built from two incompatible systems forced into coexistence on the same surface. These two systems do not negotiate.
So many words.
Between and among and beneath these systems: flowers, in greater abundance than anywhere else in the series, and less individually legible than anywhere else in the series. The painting contains more flowers than any other in the series and they are less individually anchored than in any other, they are becoming the field rather than the figure, the condition of the surface rather than its subject.
One flower has been fully described. Everything surrounding it is approximate, gestural, partially lost to the spray ground and the impasto ridges. This is the word that survived when so many others did not, not because it was more important but because it was, at the moment of its making, still fully present to the hand that made it.
In this series flowers have been witnesses, refugees, specimens, geological deposits, memorial tributes. Here they are words: produced in abundance, partially obscured, persisting in the gaps between interruptions, some arriving fully and some lost to the system of redactions that the dark ridges perform across the bright ground. The painting does not lament this. It simply shows it, the exuberant field and the systematic interruption coexisting on the same surface, neither cancelling the other, the dots continuing behind the ridges, the flowers persisting between them.
So many words. So many lost. The rest remain, in the gaps, waiting to be read.