Ardor(Terra Rossa)
Ardor(Terra Rossa) · 2026 · Mixed Media on Paper · 7 x 5 in.
A bilaterally symmetrical cut-paper form layered over a richly painted red (Terra Rossa / Terra Diva) ground in mixed media on paper, arriving at glyphs and totems that converge ancient pigment traditions with the studio's originating process of folding, cutting, and unfolding.
- Medium
- Mixed Media on Paper
- Substrate
- Paper
- Dimensions
- 7 x 5 in.
- Edition
- Unique
- Status
- Available
- Inventory
- AX-2026-003
- Scale
Drawn to scale from the recorded dimensions, against a sofa. Not a photograph of an installation.
From the series Before Words
The ground of this work is burnt sienna, which Giorgio Vasari called terra rossa, red earth, in his 16th-century accounts of Renaissance pigments. It is the same material as raw sienna, the iron-rich clay of Tuscany, but transformed by fire. Calcination, the process of heating the raw earth, removes water from the iron oxide and converts it to hematite, deepening its color from yellow-brown to the reddish-brown that has appeared in cave paintings, Roman frescoes, and the palettes of Rembrandt and Caravaggio. The ground here is earth that has been offered to fire and changed by it.
Over it, a neon yellow cut form presses outward in four directions, expansive, cross-like at its center, radiating against the black. The word ardor names what the color and the form do together: burning desire, devotion made visible, the heat of something that cannot stay still.
Passion fruit was named by Spanish missionaries who saw the Passion of Christ in the plant's flower structure, the corona as crown of thorns, the stamens as nails. Passion names both longing and suffering, desire and sacrifice. Both are present in the form and in the ground beneath it.