X

X is Grande working at full atmospheric pitch. Blush pink, coral and gold wash across a field of aluminum-painted gray, and through that haze move crimson flowering branches, periwinkle ornamental scrollwork, and a single orange band that arcs across the lower half like a ramp or a length of ribbon. The aluminum ground shifts as the viewer moves, so the light in the painting is never fixed.

The vocabulary is drawn from wallpaper, textile design, and Rococo decoration. The scrollwork motifs repeat like a pattern trying to assert itself, then get overrun by softer passages that have no edges at all. The picture keeps proposing an order and then relaxing it.

That contest between the drawn and the atmospheric is the substance of the work. The flowering branches are described with real precision, the clouds of color behind them with none, and the orange band cuts between the two registers as a piece of pure structure. Nothing in the composition is allowed to become background.

At six feet tall the painting operates at body scale, and the aluminum paint keeps it responsive to the room. It changes with the hour and the angle, which is exactly the instability the title leaves open.