Circuit Board of SELF
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Circuit Board of SELF (2026) is six feet square and contains every colour in the catalogue. Magenta, ultramarine, olive, sand, crimson, slate, near-black — seven pigments, none of them a variant of another, all of them at full strength.
The hue spread across this canvas is 87 degrees. The two paintings made immediately before it measured 3 and 13. Those were single-hue works that built their entire range out of value, and they were disciplined in a way this one refuses outright. Here the position is the opposite: everything at once, and the composition asked to hold it together.
It holds it together with seams.
The pale strips running between the blocks are the whole structural argument of the painting, and they were not drawn on top. They are the ground showing through where two blocks stopped short of one another. Nothing was added to make the structure — the structure is what was left. That is the same logic as a veil laid over a field, arrived at from the opposite end: there the shape appears where the covering paint stops, here it appears where the paint never met.
They read as traces on a board. Hence the title, and hence the trouble with the title, which I will come to.
Underneath is Abstraction, a 2023 canvas from the Ephemeral Atmosphere collection — charcoal, graphite, oxblood, teal and ochre, soft-edged and deliberately unresolved. Its stated theme was pointing inward rather than outward: a state of being rather than a narrative. Nothing of that softness survives.
This is the first transformation in the catalogue to move a canvas out of Ephemeral Atmosphere and into Geometric Splendor, and the readings record the reversal exactly. Colour range, contrast and form all rise, most of them to the ceiling. The earlier painting was a conversation with the unknown that did not need resolution. This one resolves it into blocks.
Whether that is an answer or a refusal of the question is what the painting is actually about. A title naming a circuit board of the self proposes the harder reading — that a self is not one thing but a great many, wired together and not touching, and that the honest picture of it is a diagram rather than a portrait.
I am not certain that is true. I am certain it is what the painting says.
Its ArtGram is The Shield — the shape of a work that exceeds the median on every side at once. At a mean radius of 0.99 it is the largest mark in a catalogue of 270 paintings. There is nowhere further out to go.
