"The First Split": A Garabaggio Framed Print

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

April 2nd, 11:48 PM, in the laundry room beneath the building at 44 Rutherford Avenue, where one bulb hangs from a cord too long for the ceiling it was given. I had gone down for a sock. I did not retrieve the sock. The basket stood on the concrete beside the machine, empty, cream-colored, cross-hatched all over with the diamond lattice these baskets have carried since the invention of the mold. Near the bottom of the front panel one diamond had opened. A single break no wider than a fingernail, running along the shoulder of the plastic where the weight of years had finally asked more than the plastic could give. It was the first split. I need the viewer to understand that I did not find a broken basket. I found a basket in the hour it stopped being whole, which is an entirely different subject. Caravaggio's *Calling of Saint Matthew* is not a painting of a tax collector. It is a painting of the moment before a man understands he has been chosen, and the whole event is carried by one bar of light crossing a plain wall in a plain room. This room is plainer. The bulb is worse. But the light fell through the lattice and threw the diamonds onto the concrete as a second basket, a shadow-basket, larger and more perfect than the first. Snagged in the third diamond from the corner there is a child's mitten, rose-colored, knit, one of a pair that will not be reunited. It stays there through everything that follows. This is the first station of the Book of the Cracked Laundry Basket. Ten paintings. I did not know that yet. *Fissura prima, gratia prima.*

• 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