Grey Monochrome View of a Market Clock Tower — Print & Oil Painting

The colour has been almost entirely withdrawn from this canvas and the measurement confirms it: the saturation reading is among the lowest of any work here. Black, charcoal, slate, pewter and a chalky white do all the describing, applied with a knife in flat overlapping slabs, and the few tints that survive are so weak they read as dirt on the grey rather than as hues in their own right.

The market is built out of those slabs without a drawn line anywhere. The clock tower rises at the centre right under a pitched roof, carrying two pale circles side by side where the clock faces sit, and the arcade runs away to both sides beneath it. Each arch is a dark opening scraped into the wet paint, and because they repeat at even intervals across the whole width they set the rhythm of the picture.

Behind and to the left the city is barely present. Blocks of pale grey step back into a soft white sky worked in circular scrubbing motions, with a thin dark mast or aerial rising here and there. Nothing back there is described. It exists to keep the market front from standing against nothing.

Along the bottom third the crowd arrives as vertical marks, teal, bone and slate, packed tight and none of them individual. Into that band the artist has allowed exactly one colour event: two small figures under conical hats, one in cadmium yellow and one in ochre, standing beside a bicycle whose frame is picked out in bright red. They sit low and just left of centre, and they are the reason the eye stops there.

The wet ground beneath them takes that red back down as a short broken smear. Restraint of this kind is a gamble, since a single mark has to carry the whole canvas, and here it does. Part of our Vietnam collection, alongside the same market painted under a swirling blue sky and a grey rainy street beneath a tall tapering tower.