OCTOBER 7th, 2023. The colors of war.

The first thing the work does is refuse an order of reading. Where a tall sheet gives the eye somewhere to travel — up out of the ground, or down through strata — this one is square, and everything in it arrives at once. There is no top to escape to and no bottom to rest on. The event is presented as simultaneous: a single field in which the body, its raised hands, the scarf, the crowds, the ordnance and the spring branches all occupy the same instant.

At the center stands a woman's body in flat, unmixed red — the only fully saturated form in the picture and the only one given a whole silhouette. Her contours are drawn over the color in a thin dark line: breasts, navel, the fold of the pelvis, the long muscles of the legs. At the shoulders the red gives out and she continues upward in line alone. Her head and raised arms are drawn into the pale folds above, unfilled, so that the most solid thing in the picture thins as it rises and her face is carried by the same open contour as everything happening around it. She is body below and drawing above. Her feet reach the bottom edge and stand in the rubble. Across her chest and abdomen the red is bruised with dark grey and brown stains, worked into the pigment rather than laid on top — damage that has soaked in.

Her arms open above her and her two hands are drawn at full stretch, fingers spread, wrists bent back, held wide apart at the top of the sheet. They are the largest gesture in the work and the whole upper half is given over to them. Raised hands mean surrender, and they mean pleading, and they mean being seized. What fills that upper half with them is her scarf. Broad cream and white folds swing across the top of the sheet, and the blue opening between them — laid in watercolor beneath the pastel, so that it reads as stain rather than as chalk — is the blue of the Israeli flag. The scarf is no longer worn. It has come loose and taken over the sky of the picture, blue against white, unmistakable at a glance and never stated outright. It is the one place where a national fact is admitted, and it is admitted as cloth rather than as emblem: torn open, blown wide, still attached to a woman with her hands in the air.

The watercolor is not confined to the scarf. It goes down first across the sheet and stays visible — pooling and granulating under the flag-blue, under the peach and rust blooms in the rubble, under the bruising on the body — while the pastel is worked over it in opaque fields that seal the surface. The picture therefore holds two kinds of mark: the dry compacted color that builds the world, and the wet color beneath it that behaves like something soaking through.

To the right, two clusters of small figures are drawn in outline on grey and on peach: people pressed shoulder to shoulder, heads bowed or raised, no faces, no individual detail. They are the only groups in the picture, and they are rendered so lightly that they read almost as watermark. Whether they are the sheltering, the herded or the taken is left open; what the handling insists on is that they have been reduced to a single mass with no one distinguishable inside it.

Across the entire surface run willow branches hung with silver catkins. They cross the body, the crowds, the posts and the rubble without regard for depth, strung horizontally like wire. They also do not belong to the season. Catkins are early spring, and this is an October date — the sign of renewal has been laid deliberately across an autumn atrocity, out of time, in the same way it might be carried into a church on Palm Sunday.

The lower half is ruin: black and cream zigzags, ochre washes, angular fragments that could be a shattered floor or an aerial view of broken ground. Scattered through it are small painted rounds and rockets, gold-brown, delicately tapered, each one finished with the same patient attention given to the catkins. That equivalence is the picture's hardest decision. Ordnance and blossom are the same size, the same care, the same scatter — two kinds of small thing falling through the same air.

Grey-green posts and beams cross the composition at intervals, framing nothing — the remains of a structure, a window or a doorway or a fence, whose only function now is to divide.

The work argues by simultaneity. It does not narrate the day. It puts one woman with her hands raised, her scarf come loose across the sky, the crowd, the falling rounds and the spring branch into a single square and holds them there, and the viewer is given no sequence in which any of it resolves.

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