Madone

A red circle on a wall is read before anything else: it is a signal, a sun, a seal. Inside it stands a black figure with a golden face — the Mother of God reduced to three colours. The round icon, the tondo, has been known since antiquity, but here the circle is not a frame but the image itself: it closes around the figure the way a veil closes around a face.

The series holds four states of one sign. A black silhouette on red, where only the tilt of the head and the gold of the face are left of the icon. Eyes in a circle — a work in which the Virgin is present by a single gaze. A face with a gold-leaf halo, closer to the canon. And a blue triptych where the red circle moves from panel to panel like the sun across three windows.

The red is laid in many layers with a transparent depth; the black is matte relief; the gold is leaf, muted with wax. Over it all, epoxy resin, which makes the red denser still. The format is round, cut separately for each work. The edition is numbered.

A work for large walls and long corridors, where the image must be read from the far end. The red circle is seen from the next room; the face, when you come close.