One drum in the row is lit. I counted six others and I could not resolve the end of the wall.
That is the painting. A line of machines running away from the viewer into the left of the frame, each one a dark cabinet with a dark circle in it, and then, close to us, one door with gold behind the glass and a pale twist of cotton turning inside it. Beyond that lit door the row continues to the right and goes black again within two machines.
There is no chair in this one. No hands, no coat, no silhouette. This is the room when the person who started that cycle has gone out for twenty minutes, or is standing outside smoking, or has simply walked home and will come back at the end.
I painted it because it is the building’s own condition. Almost all of the time, in almost all of these rooms, this is the state of things: one machine working, everything else dark, nobody present.
The light does one job here that I could not get anywhere else in the series. It rakes. Because the lit door is set into a wall that runs away at a shallow angle, the spill leaves the glass and grazes along the cabinets to the left, so the flaked enamel on each of them is caught edge-on and the whole row is read by its damage. Every chip, every place where the paint has lifted, throws a small shadow. The machines are described entirely by what has come off them.
On the floor, a lozenge of gold on wet tile, with the reflection sitting inside it and a long bright smear pulling toward the viewer where the water is standing. The tiles are wet because tiles in a laundromat are wet. Somebody carried a load through and it dripped.
I want to be plain about the arithmetic in this picture. Seven machines, and the entire illumination of a room eleven metres long is the surplus of one bulb bolted inside one of them. That bulb is not on because it is night. It is on because a drum is turning. When this cycle finishes, the light will go out from inside the glass and the room will be black until the tube over the counter comes on for the folding, and then that will go off too.
The building has no lamp of its own. Every light in it is attached to a task, and when the task ends the light ends, and no part of the mechanism has any provision for keeping a room lit for the sake of a room.
That is what a vigil actually is, when you look at what the word requires. Not a mood. A watch kept while something burns, for as long as the thing burns, by whoever is there.
Nobody is there.