Parents, 2026

Reduced to its most essential geometry, Parents stands two figures side by side — black rectilinear silhouettes with pale faces inclined toward one another, set against a canvas split into fields of cream and earthen brown. Between them runs a single column of green, rising like a shared trunk; bands of ochre frame the pair at the edges. It is the smallest painting in the collection, and the most concentrated.

Nothing here is described, yet everything is recognizable. Two presences, close enough to form one architecture; a warmth held in the lean of the heads; the green between them reading as the life they raised and tended together. The almost pixel-like reduction gives the couple the permanence of a monument — as if decades of standing side by side had worn the figures down to their truest, simplest shape.

In a collection preoccupied with acceleration — machines, markets, intelligence beyond us — Parents is the still point. It speaks of lineage and quiet endurance: the people who stood behind us before any of it began, and who remain standing there whatever comes. What survives the algorithm, the painting suggests, is not only the human trace but its origin — two figures, together, holding up a shared green world.