Reclining Woman

Hold on to this night.

We went to visit a friend who led us through the darkness of her wild apartment. It had something of the world of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”: familiar things became strange, and the space took on a logic of its own. For me, the night was a psychedelic journey in which reality mingled with imagination.

Horse riding wove its way into this story — rhythm, speed and the body surrendering to movement. That restlessness returns in the tangled lines of the figure, in the tension between outline and colour.

I painted a woman in ecstasy, in a drunken haze. I wanted to stop time: the intensity of the moment, the movement of the body and the feeling that the night might last a little longer. Paint and line became a record of that state.

Everything unfolded like a wild dream, one we only woke from the following day. “Reclining Woman” remained as a trace of that journey — a night that briefly pulled us out of the ordinary passage of time.