"The First Exhaustion": A Garabaggio Framed Print

Oil on digital canvas, 2026. Post-Consumer Baroque series.

October 9th, 2:41 AM, on the loading apron behind the hardware store on Wilbert Street, where the security lamp has been aimed at nothing for eleven years. It was lying on the wet asphalt with its positive terminal turned toward me. A single cell. The gold wrapper had gone dull and the printing had been worn off entirely by whatever pocket or drawer or gutter it had passed through, so that what remained was only the shape: a cylinder, a body, a thing that had been full and was now not. One small blue fleck survived near the middle, the last syllable of whatever it had once been told to say about itself. I did not pick it up for four days. I passed it eleven times. On the twelfth pass the lamp light came across the asphalt low and sideways and the cell caught it along its entire length like a fuse that had already finished burning, and I understood what I had been refusing to understand. This object had given everything it contained to something else. The something else had not thanked it. It had been put out still holding the shape of its usefulness. Caravaggio's *Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy* is not about the wound at all. It is about a body that has stopped resisting and is being held up by light alone. So is this. The viewer will note that nothing in the frame supports the cell. It supports itself, on a wet ground, at an hour when no one was scheduled to be looking. It is the first voice in the choir. It is already silent. *Vox exhausta.*

• Premium black frame with white mat and acrylic glazing
• Giclée printed on acid-free, gallery-grade 220 gsm paper
• REACH-certified inks, sustainably sourced woodstock
• Ships worldwide via Printify fulfillment