Boxers Trading Blows in Vivid Color — Print & Oil Painting

For the first few seconds it is not a fight at all, only colour: scarlet, cadmium orange, turquoise, viridian and cobalt slabbed on in broad strokes that seem to have been laid down faster than they could have been thought about. Then two bodies resolve out of it, and once they have resolved you cannot unsee them.

The figures are locked together at the centre, one leaning in from the left with the near arm buried in the other's body, the second bent back and away, weight going onto the rear foot. A glove reads as a red block at the right; a white shape at the lower left is a hand or a towel and refuses to settle. Faces are never described. Musculature is suggested by where the colour changes, not by drawing.

The background is doing the same job as a crowd without ever becoming one: a green field on the left, a hot red block on the right, turquoise slashes across the top. It is loud, and the loudness is the subject, since a boxing ring is one of the few places where noise is part of the architecture.

Two boxers in contact and no reference to a scoreline, a corner or a result. The painting takes the sport at its most abstract, the instant where two people become a single shape, and leaves everything else out of the frame.

Part of our Rocky collection. For the other side of the same sport, the moment after rather than during, see Victorious Boxer Raising Red Gloves.