“ All Stripes

The painting lives on a field of yellow that is not decoration. Yellow here is the ground that will not stay quiet — sun, heat, gold, and exposure at once. It is the color that makes every fragment visible. Nothing can hide in it. Against that field, a cooler gray-blue sits at the top like weather or distance. It is the only large area that does not insist. Memory often arrives that way: a quieter register above the body. The stripes do the real work. Lime, white-yellow, cobalt, violet, and black bands cut through the forms the way cloth, scar, and lineage cut through a life. They are not one meaning. They can read as ceremonial textile, as uniform, as DNA, as the bars of a window. The artist lets them stay multiple. Darker greens and blacks pool inside the torn shapes. They give the fragments weight and secrecy. Color is not used to soothe. Bright bands sit next to almost-black so the eye keeps finding both the surface and what the surface is covering. The overall effect is collage as argument: high-chroma marks refuse to dissolve into the yellow ground. Color is how the work says the past is not finished. It is still striped, still moving, still insisting on being seen.