Close in now, at the hour when the light outside has gone and the panel starts to be the brightest thing on the street.
Four objects in this painting. A perforated speaker at the top, cropped. A blank name window in its brass surround. A small red indicator. One round button.
The button is the subject. It is domed brass, about the size of a thumbnail, and it has been pressed so many times that the plating has gone from the centre of the dome and what is underneath is showing through in a rough circle. Around that circle the brass is still brass. The wear is not even and it is not centred, it is offset slightly up and to the left, because most people are right-handed and approach a panel from the same side and land on a button at the same angle.
That offset patch is a portrait of every visitor this building has had.
I do not know a better argument for painting these things. Nobody kept a record of who came to that door. There is no register, no book, no camera that lasted. But the metal kept count. Not of names, which it could not know, but of the quantity of arriving, which it has recorded with complete accuracy in the only units available to it, which are microns of plating.
The red indicator is small and I have given it a lot of glow, more than it strictly threw, and I will defend that. At dusk on a dark street that pinpoint is the first thing you see from thirty feet away, and by the time you are close enough to read the panel your eye has already been to it four or five times. Painting it at its literal size would be accurate and would misrepresent the experience.
The speaker grille is cropped at the top edge, out of focus, waiting. It has nothing to do yet.
The name window beside the button is empty and lit and the light passes through the glazing and finds nothing behind it but the back of the slot. That small illuminated nothing is the second brightest thing in the picture. I have hung a lamp on an absence and I am aware of it.
This is the moment before pressing. There is no sound in the painting. Nothing has happened. A person is standing in the cold with their hand not yet up, reading down a list they already know is useless, doing it anyway, because that is what the object is for and the object is very persuasive.