"The Wheel Without a Bicycle": A Garabaggio Framed Print

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

A wheel alone is not a fragment. It is a survivor, and survivors are the proper subject of devotional painting. October 26th, 3:19 AM, on the wet cobble outside the shuttered laundromat at Delacroix and 9th, where the sodium lamp lays a long gold ladder across the stones and does not reach the far side of the street. The bicycle was gone. Everything above the axle was gone. What remained was one front wheel, still round, still true, leaning against the cast-iron bollard it had been locked to, the U-lock still through the rim and around the post, holding nothing to nothing. Thirty-six spokes, all of them intact, all of them under tension. A small amber reflector clamped between two of them at the eleven o'clock position, catching the lamp like a lit window. Blue rim tape at the valve, the only cool color anywhere in the frame. I stood there a long time. Caravaggio's *Narcissus* is a painting about a figure and its reflection in dark water, and the reason it works is that the reflection is worse than the figure: dimmer, softer, less certain of itself. The wet cobbles gave the wheel that same inferior twin. The viewer will notice that the wheel is not leaning for support. It is leaning the way a person leans when they have been waiting a very long time and have decided not to complain about it. First station. *Rota sine curru.*

• 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