They took out the middle chair.
I came back in November and the row had a hole in it. Three seats, a gap, four seats. The rail runs straight through the empty space with its mounting points bare, and the two chairs on either side of the gap are leaning very slightly inward, the way a row does when you remove a member of it and do not re-tension anything.
I asked. The answer was that it was broken. That is almost certainly true and I have no reason to doubt it and it is not the interesting part.
The interesting part is on the floor.
Where the chair stood there is a pale rectangle. Everything around it is the colour that composite flooring becomes after thirty years of municipal shoes, which is a kind of exhausted grey brown with the pattern gone out of it. Under the chair the original floor is still there. It is lighter. You can see what the room was supposed to look like, in a patch about the size of a seat, because for three decades a chair stood on it and nobody walked there.
I have painted that rectangle at the exact centre of the picture with the light falling on it, which is a compositional decision I would defend in any company. It is the brightest thing in the room and it is a piece of the floor.
This is the second time in this cycle I have ended up painting a pale rectangle where a thing used to be. At the supermarket it was the footprint of a self-checkout terminal on the tile. Here it is a chair. I did not plan the repetition and I noticed it only when the two panels were leaning against the same wall of the studio, and it has been bothering me since.
The room preserves best the places where it was least used. Every surface here that has been sat on, walked over, touched, leaned against, has been worn down to nothing. The one square of floor that is still what it was is the one nobody could reach.
And it was my seat. I sat in the middle chair for eleven hours in a picture three panels back, and this is where it stood, and the floor underneath it was in better condition than any other part of the room.