Affinity (2026) — The Hand Is Hers, the Attention Is His
A woman sits on a deep red sofa in a dark blue robe. On the floor in front of her sits a yellow dog. Between them, on a dark table, stand two small chess pieces. Everyone arrives at this painting with the same assumption already made: she is the mind, he is the company. Affinity spends the rest of the picture taking that assumption apart.
A condition, not a story
Look at what the paint actually decided. In the entire canvas, exactly two things share a colour — her face and the whole body of the dog. The same lemon yellow, the same violet oil-stick line drawn around both, the same violet used for her eyes and for his. Nothing else on the picture is treated that way. The affinity of the title is never narrated as sentiment; it is administered as pigment. She has his colour. He has her face.
The hand is hers, the attention is his
Then the turn. Her hand is open above the board — and she is not looking at it. Her eyes go straight out of the painting, calm and slightly unfocused, the expression of someone whose move was made a long time ago and who has stopped waiting for the reply. The dog's eyes are angled down and to the left. They are on the pieces. In a picture that contains exactly one game, the only player still calculating is the one who was supposed to be the pet.
That is the quiet joke and the real subject. Affinity is not what two beings have in common; it is how they divide the labour. Spend enough years beside another creature and you stop duplicating each other and start handing things over. She has handed him the part that requires thinking. He has accepted it the way dogs accept a job — completely, and without ever mentioning it. Which leaves the question the painting refuses to answer: if he is playing, who is he playing against, and how long has she been losing?
Wet-in-wet, with the oil stick doing all the drawing
Like the other works of the 2026 series, the entire field is painted wet-in-wet with large brushes — figure, robe, sofa and the restless interior laid down while the paint is still live, so each colour bleeds into the next and the boundaries dissolve. The reference points are the German Expressionists: bent perspective, heightened, emotionally charged colour, a surface that keeps moving.
Over that fluid ground, the oil stick carries the whole drawn layer: the heavy violet contour that circles the dog, the black lines describing muzzle, chest and legs, the green sweep of both hands, the violet around the sitter's eyes and mouth, the signature in green at the lower right. The same drawn line does both creatures — which is precisely why they read as one unit before you have worked out why. Freedom below, precision above, and no scraping back: the image is built forward, like every figurative work in this series.
The second portrait of the new series
The 2026 series began with village scenes and landscapes, then moved into portraiture with La Sentinelle. Affinity is the second portrait and the first double portrait: two protagonists, one human and one not, holding a single interior on equal terms. Collectors who know the abstract series will recognise the architect's instinct for structure underneath the riot of colour — the dark table cutting a horizontal through the middle, the sofa framing the sitter, the dog anchoring the lower right corner where the composition would otherwise fall away.
Made by a real person — not AI
Like every work in the studio, Affinity is an original, one-of-a-kind painting, made by hand by a real person, not AI. The merged colours, the shared yellow, the drawn violet line sitting proud of the wet surface — all of it is intentional, and all of it is the record of a human body working fast in front of a canvas nearly two metres wide.
Affinity, 2026. Acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 130 × 180 cm (height × width). Signed on the front and the back. Part of the figurative works.