The stretch of wall you pass twenty times a day and have never once looked at. Between the kitchen and the rest of the house. That is where this one earns its keep, because it works on you sideways, in the two seconds you give it.
Landscape format. Flat blocks of colour, hard clean edges, no brush marks anywhere. It reads as architecture. And then one block of terracotta pushes out past its support and hangs there, with nothing underneath it.
The part that keeps pulling you back
Look at the gap under that terracotta block. Not the block. The gap. Alex Ward builds the whole picture so your eye goes to empty space and stays there, waiting for something to give. It never does. The structure is impossible and completely rigorous at the same time, which is a hard trick to pull off twice, and he does it in four colours.
That is his thing: the interval between shapes is the subject. One warm block against cool ones, measured to the millimetre. As Ruby put it, “The visual tension and precision in ‘Projecting Over Nothing’ make it captivating on any wall.”
What it does to the room
Colour that behaves. It anchors a room instead of shouting across it, so the sofa, the rug and the door frames all stay where they were. Order, not decoration. People who like order notice it within about a minute and cannot say why.
On the wall in two minutes
A high quality canvas print of a digital work, stretched over solid wood an inch and a quarter deep. The image wraps the sides, so there is nothing to frame and nothing to buy after. One nail and it is done. Matte, so a window opposite gives you the picture back rather than your own lamp. Made to order, up to ten business days, free shipping in the continental US.
Most walls take the 20×16 (50.8 x 40.6 cm) at $149. The 14×11 is $129, and the 24×18 goes wider than a sideboard at $229.
One honest thing
It is cool, exact and unsentimental. No horizon, no weather, nothing to feel misty about. If you want a picture that tells a story, this is not it.
If precision is what you like, take it home. If you are still thinking, look through the rest of what Alex has built — or follow him and you will see the next one before it goes up.
