Arcadia

Memory of place

Arcádia is what stays after a place is gone.

I have been to more than two hundred of them, and almost none of these paintings were made in front of anything. They were made months or years later, from what survived: a temperature, a colour that was wrong, the way the light behaved at one particular hour.

What survives is never the detail. It is the arrangement. So the paintings are arrangements too, flat fields with the description taken out, and the colour is rarely the colour that was there. Skies come out coral, cliffs come out magenta, sand comes out orange.

When there are figures, they are seen from behind, or from directly above, or reduced to a few centimetres inside a field of water. They keep their faces. Whatever they are thinking is theirs.