The screen is off, and because it is off, it is finally showing something that is true.
One small orange light, low in the black glass, a long way back. That is a streetlight outside the store windows, forty feet behind me and slightly to the left, arriving here by reflection. It is the first thing this machine has displayed in eight panels that did not originate inside the machine.
I stood in front of it for a long time. A dead screen is a mirror with terrible manners. It shows you the room dimly and yourself dimly and it puts everything at the wrong distance, and if there is one point source anywhere behind you it will find it and hold it, and that is what has happened here.
For eight paintings this rectangle has been the brightest object in every frame it appeared in. It invited me. It examined me with a red beam. It refused a tin of soup. It called for a supervisor with an amber lamp. It weighed bread and it weighed a key. It did all of that by emitting light, which is the only way it knows how to be present in a room.
Turned off, it is a black panel in a metal frame that reflects a street it will never see.
I have painted a lot of dark glass in this style, because it is where the tradition and the subject agree most completely. Caravaggio built his pictures out of a lit thing and an unlit surround, and a powered-down screen in a closed supermarket gives you that arrangement for nothing. The difficulty is that the black is not one black. There is the black of the glass, the black of the plastic bezel around it, and the black of the room behind, and they are three different temperatures, and if you paint them as one flat dark the whole panel dies.
The orange point is about four millimetres across on the canvas. It took most of an evening. Everything in the painting is arranged so that your eye eventually finds it, and when it does, the thing you have found is a light from outside, in a room that has spent this entire series insisting that the only light worth looking at was its own.