Abstract Yellow and Blue Light on an Old Quarter Facade — Print & Oil Painting

Nothing here is drawn. The whole surface is built from knife strokes dragged in short flat runs, and the buildings exist only because those runs are stacked at the angles a street would stack them. Read it quickly and it is a wall of green and yellow. Read it slowly and a row of frontages steps back to the right, storey over storey, with the ground dropping away to the lower left.

The yellow is the light. It appears as blocks of cadmium and lemon at three or four points, largest in the lower centre where it floods a whole bay, smaller higher up where it reads as a lit room. Each block is bounded by black, and the blackness is not shadow so much as a drawn edge, scraped into the wet paint with the point of the blade.

Blue does the opposite work. It runs down the right side and across the upper third in cooler, thinner passes, standing for shuttered fronts, for sky between roofs, for the parts of the street the sun does not reach. Where the two meet, along the centre of the canvas, the painter has laid short bars of red and orange, and those are the only marks that could be called incidents.

Green surrounds the whole thing. It comes up from the bottom edge, along the left, and over the top right corner in olive and moss, sometimes scraped so thin that the weave shows through. It has no described function, and it makes the built centre feel enclosed rather than open.

The measured hue falls in the oranges and yellows, which the lit bays account for despite how much green is present, and the value sits low. This is the most abstracted street in the group. Part of our Vietnam collection, alongside a pastel mosaic of rooftops massed on a hillside and an abstract geometric stilt village reflected in golden water.