Bare, the frame stopped looking like a ruin and started looking like a drawing. February 2nd, 2:38 AM, at the low curb where Marne meets the rail cut, and I found both parts of it in one place for the first time since December. Not together. In one place.
The last of the cloth lay up on the curb stone in a small dark knot, wrung out by weeks of freeze and thaw, no longer readable as a canopy and no longer readable as anything. The frame was down on the pavement below, ribs opened in a full circle, every wire drawn as one continuous silver line against the black wet. There is no lamp in this painting. I want that noticed. The light in the ninth station arrives from a source outside the frame that I never identified and did not go looking for, and it falls on the ribs and nowhere else. The last pictures Caravaggio made were left on a boat at Porto Ercole and never recovered. All that survives of them is a customs list giving the size of each one and nothing else. No subject. No argument. Item by item, the way a municipal worker inventories damage. That is the attitude I brought to these ribs. The cloth is finished working. It is eight inches of dark matter on a curb, and the viewer is asked to consider that the object is now more visible than it has ever been, and that this became true only after everything designed to be seen had been taken off it.
Prints available. Acquire this work as a fine art reproduction, worthy of any wall that deserves better.
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