Weathered Cyclo Resting in a Textured Grey Street — Print & Oil Painting

There is nobody in this painting. A cyclo stands alone in the middle of an empty grey street, turned slightly away so that the passenger end and the driver's end are both legible at once, and the artist has given it the entire canvas to itself.

The machine repays the attention. Its passenger bench sits low and forward on the left with a pale cushion and a folded hood frame above it, the driver's saddle and bars ride high at the right over the rear wheel, and the pedal crank hangs between the two. The frame is worked in near black and a bruised blue. Both rims are heavy dark loops with the spokes mostly left out, a few scratched into the wet paint with the point of the knife.

Around it there is nothing but surface. Vertical drags of grey, lilac and off white run the full height of the canvas behind the vehicle, a horizontal band of the same handling carries the ground forward, and a soft dark pool under the wheels stands in for a shadow. No horizon, no doorway, no kerb. The setting has been dissolved on purpose, so that the object cannot be dated or placed.

Colour has been almost entirely withheld, and the measurement agrees: apart from a few rust and umber notes worked into the lower left, this is a study in greys. What the restraint buys is stillness. A cyclo exists in order to move and to carry, and here it does neither. Part of our Vietnam collection, and the reverse in every respect of a cyclo driver crossing a flooded street in the rain, or of an empty cyclo parked outside a flower shop where the same idleness is at least given somewhere to be.