Iron Man Bathed in Crimson Battle Light — Print & Oil Painting

Everything in this canvas has been pushed through the same red filter, and the result is closer to a photograph shot through coloured glass than to a painting built from many hues. Sky, ground, armour and skin all sit inside a narrow band of scarlet, rust and dried blood, and the saturation reading is among the highest anywhere in this group.

He is looking up and to the left, chin lifted, mouth closed, one small hard highlight caught in the eye. The head is unhelmeted again, and the artist has used the red light to model it: the cheekbone, the bridge of the nose and the upper lip take the glare while the far side of the face drops away into a deeper maroon.

The chest is the second event. A triangular lamp is set into the breastplate and it burns cold white against all that heat, the only colour in the picture that refuses the filter. Two smaller round lamps sit lower on the abdomen and repeat it faintly. Down the right of the frame a vertical flare of white and gold streaks past his shoulder and breaks into rays.

Behind him the ground is broken and dusty, laid in flat washes with grain and speckle scattered over the top, and a dark shape at the extreme right edge is cropped so hard it reads as a shoulder and nothing more. Every one of these background elements has been kept soft, so the metal stays the only thing in focus.

The colour scheme was a joke before it became an emblem. Told that his first working suit looked ostentatious in bare metal, its builder answered by asking for a little hot rod red, and every armour since has carried the paint job of a customised car. A canvas that drowns the entire world in that colour is taking the joke at its word. Part of our Marvel collection, beside the same face lit instead by cold violet and neon and the helmet alone, centred on a flat red poster.