Abstract painting Sea Change by Ritu Raj: a combed blue field sweeping down from the upper left like weather over deep water, darkening toward navy at the upper right, with viridian and sea green diffused along the lower edge.

Four arms of blue flow inward and meet, and at the meeting there is light — brighter than anything that arrived. Painted over a 2022 canvas turned ninety degrees, where the ridges of a painting that no longer exists carry all the glow.

Something in this painting has stopped moving and started giving off heat. A cobalt sanctum radiating ring after ring into an orange field — not a fortress keeping the warmth out, but the source that makes it.

One body in this painting refuses to hold still. The blue moves through a field that outnumbers it — jointed, insistent, declining to be absorbed — until you stay long enough to hear it was a passage all along.