Abstract Sunset in Red Over a Floating Village Near Saigon — Print & Oil Painting

There are no curves in this painting except the boats. The city behind is a field of rectangles, the awnings and roofs of the settlement are triangles and wedges, the reflections below are vertical bars, and every one of those shapes has been put down flat with a knife. Then two long hulls are drawn across the middle in single continuous strokes, thin, black, lifted at both ends, and they cut through all that geometry like handwriting laid over print.

Red is the ground the picture is set into. It fills the sky at the top as a smooth graded wash, returns across the bottom half as water, and shows through between the shanties wherever a gap is left, so the settlement reads as something floating on red rather than painted onto it. The measured saturation is among the highest in the collection and the surface is exactly that hot.

The settlement is where the colour breaks up. Awnings and roofs in pink, cobalt, teal, cream and violet are packed edge to edge across the centre, each a separate slab with its neighbours showing at the joins, and beneath them a dense band of smaller marks stands in for cargo, poles, people and clutter without describing any of it.

Above and behind, a city is stated in the plainest terms available: blocks of chrome yellow and ochre with dark windows scratched into them, rising in an irregular skyline, and one tall tapering tower at the centre that runs higher than everything else and carries a small spur near its top. Below the boats the reflection is made of vertical drags of the same reds and yellows, pulled down until they thin out, and the canvas closes at the bottom edge in almost unbroken red. From our Vietnam collection, beside a stilt village reduced to a mosaic of small bright rectangles over golden water and a skyline arrived at purely by stacking blue slabs.