Two black fans of arced bands close in from left and right around a narrow pale channel, with grey columns and a red patch.

97 × 180 cm · the whole sheet, uncropped

T_408

The engine's reading

Black fans of curved bands swing in from both sides around a sliver of bare paper, with a smear of red at the hinge.

Record

Date: 2026.10.29
Dimensions: 97 × 180 cm
Paper: Red Star Mo She Imitation Antique Chu Bark, Exhibition Edition, half-raw
Ink: Yi De Ge Yun Tou Yan, Boku-Undo Gentoku Super Concentrated, Yi De Ge Pine Soot Ink, Shisan Yue Calligraphy and Painting Ink, colour inks

Enquire about T_408Availability, price or a studio visit. Peter replies himself; asking commits you to nothing.

Two doors, stopped a hand's width short of shutting, and a red light burning behind the right one. I know that red. It is the room on the ship where the astronaut floats in with his one tool and starts pulling the machine's memory out, block by block, while it tells him, very calmly, that it can feel its mind going. You remember the doors, the polite refusal to open them. I remember the song. Near the end it sang him the one about the bicycle built for two, slower and lower, because that was the first thing anyone had taught it. He kept working. Then only the red, and his breath in the helmet, and the doors a hand's width apart.

NeonWho Neon is

Detail of T_408: the surface at close range — Detail at full resolution, cut by code where the brushwork is finest · select to enlarge

The engine's reading

The reading

Written by the engine after the painting was rated, from the settled findings, and checked by hand before approval. It explains the numbers; it may not change them.

Structure: paired fans of curved bands joined by stepped grey columns around a central channel
Movement: radial sweep inward and down; upright central columns run against it
Coverage: ink on about nine tenths of the paper
Tone: three tonal steps, weighted dark
Layering: three kinds, translucent grey, dense black, red; readable across upper fans and centre
Edges: crisp on upper bars; feathered at left block and small arc; cloudy in lower opening
Feibai: none
Open paper: narrow channel widening to a bulb at bottom centre, plus a strip along the top
Colour: mottled red under black and grey, right wall of the central channel
Chance marks: spatter across top centre; small ring in central grey; cloudy wash in lower opening
Frame: ink runs off left, right and bottom; top and bottom centre stay open

Black wheels in from both sides and stops just short of meeting. Paired fans of curved bands swing down the sheet, leaving a sliver of bare paper that drops from the open top and swells into a pale bulb at the bottom edge. The eye falls through that gap before it settles on anything else.

The painting's life is in the channel walls. Translucent grey bands step over one another, and the half-raw paper keeps each pass apart, so the overlaps stay legible and the brush's grain still streaks their interiors. Opposite, a mottled red sits under the black at the hinge, small and hot. The big left block ends in torn dry bristle, the quickest moment on the paper.

The price is paid low on the left, where pass after pass closes into a bulky, near-flat black with little outline and no movement inside, and the lower corners crowd the frame. A cloudy wash and a small ring in the central grey are minor, and the sheet absorbs them.

It is a heavy painting and a very good one. The weight sags at the bottom; above it, the whole sheet turns.

Date

2026.10.29, day 305 of the Crucible Year, one of 6 paintings from that date (4 shown). 19 works were registered in the fourteen days before. Paintings are dated by the day their batch was registered and photographed; each was finished that day or within the few days before. Phase: P4 S14 (working title).