March 15th, 12:41 AM, and the sound was gone before I saw the reason for it. Eleven years of a hum I had never once consciously heard, and its absence stopped me at the top of the corridor like a hand laid flat on the chest. Somebody from building services had come down, pulled the machine forward off the wall, and taken the plug out. That is all. It took them, I would estimate, four seconds. In the foreground of this painting, lying on the wet tile where they dropped it, is the plug itself: two brass prongs, one bright and one dulled, with the cord coiling back toward the base of the machine in a long S the entire width of the canvas.
I have painted a great many discarded things and this is the first time I have painted the exact instrument of a discarding. Note that the cord is the brightest object in the eighth station. It takes the far sconce along its whole length like a wet rope on a harbour wall. The machine behind it has become a black rectangle with the ghost of the suspended package still just legible on the second shelf, and the floor gives back that one distant lamp in a broken orange column running from the vanishing point down to the viewer’s feet. Caravaggio made The Denial of Saint Peter in eleven days, in a borrowed room, with a fire for a lamp, and he understood that you do not show the event. You show the helmet, the raised finger, the fire, and you let the light carry the rest. I have shown the plug. Vox machinae siluit.
Prints available. Acquire this work as a fine art reproduction, worthy of any wall that deserves better.
| Unframed Print | Framed Print |