Sucht · the labyrinthine allure
Art | Street
One real cigarette, never lit, at the centre of a field of looping red-oxide paint. Every loop circles back to it. Hung on the fences where people step out to smoke.
- Location
- Newark
- Medium
- red-oxide acrylic on canvas, one unlit cigarette
- Category
- Art | Street
- Year
- 2024
Sucht
the labyrinthine allure
Sucht is the German word for addiction, and it sits inside Sehnsucht, longing. The piece is about tobacco: how one cigarette becomes the next until the habit is the only path left. One real cigarette, never lit, is pressed into the centre of a small canvas, filter up. It is the only straight line on the panel and it is still whole. Around it red-oxide acrylic is laid thick in continuous loops that are never lifted and never resolved, tightest at the centre and loosening toward the edges, so the eye is pulled in the way the habit pulls.
The loops overlap until they become a maze with no exit drawn into it. The paint stands proud of the canvas, ridged and glossy, so the field reads as something to get lost in rather than a flat image. The colour is the colour of the habit: tobacco, rust, dried blood, warm from across a room and heavy up close. A thin margin of white canvas survives round the field. It is the only clear ground left, the life outside the spiral, still there and getting narrower.
The loops close on the one straight line; the tobacco end, unlit.
A painted cigarette would be an image. A real one is a fact, and it keeps the work honest about its subject. Because it is unlit, nothing has happened yet, and everything around it already has: the spiral is the future the single cigarette carries. The surface is beautiful on purpose. It invites the eye in the way the habit does, and then shows that there is no line out.
In July 2024 the canvas went up in Newark, first on the green steel mesh of a building by the park and then on a black iron park fence: the edges of streets where people step out to smoke. A message about addiction placed where people smoke reaches the people it concerns, at the moment of the habit rather than in a gallery. It was hung, photographed and taken down, and the canvas survives.
On the green mesh and on the park fence, Newark, July 2024.
The elevation: one line looped to the centre, the cigarette upright.
Index
01
02
03
04
05
06
07
08
09
10
11