Oranges and Flower Vase

ORANGES AND FLOWER VASE
Every great civilisation that ever flourished around the Mediterranean left its mark in clay.
The Greeks, the Romans, the Moors, the Phoenicians — all of them decorated their vessels with the particular obsessive care of cultures that understood that a vase is never just a container. It is a record. Of the hands that made it, the world that surrounded it, the beauty that whoever commissioned it believed was worth preserving in permanent form. Walk through any archaeological museum along the Mediterranean coast and you will find them: painted with flowers, with geometric patterns, with the animals and myths and daily life of civilisations that are otherwise gone. The vessel outlasted everything else.
That fascination — with ancient pottery, with the decorated surface as a form of language, with the vessel as both ordinary object and extraordinary carrier of meaning — is where this painting begins.
Oranges and Flower Vase is the first work in this series on large canvas. The scale was new, the impulse was immediate, the hand moved without waiting for approval. A green vessel with its red flower, painted with the energy of someone discovering in real time what happens when you stop being careful. Around it, a background of the most vivid orange — not chosen arbitrarily, but felt. The orange of the south of Spain, where the light falls differently than anywhere else and the land produces citrus of an intensity that people who have only eaten supermarket fruit have genuinely never encountered. The orange of a childhood remembered through the particular quality of sunlight on fertile land, of fruit heavy on branches, of a country whose warmth is not just meteorological.
The washi tape grid beneath it all carries the visual DNA of an artist finding his language. Experimental. Energetic. Completely itself.
The Mediterranean made vessels to last forever. This one carries its memory forward.
105 × 105 cm (image) · 120 × 120 cm (canvas) · Acrylic, washi tape and mixed media on 100% cotton canvas · 2021 · One of a kind Unframed, delivered rolled. Signed, titled and dated on the reverse. Certificate of Authenticity included.