1. Pitchblende

Pitch-blind. Let the ground be as occult. The subterranean pith whose ineffability is its whole substance. A work is conjured like how those glowing-exterminating crystals emerged from M.C.’s cauldron. They begin just as black, just as deceptive, with the same green sprites occluded within that same viscoelastic muck-dark. Stir the pitchblende—make a vow to the interminable, deathly toil. Dal niente.

2. Quoits

Just as it’s drawn from the pitch, the form extruded into string, those glowworms that hang from the ceiling of the grotto, phosphofurfuraceous like so many diatoms hanging inside of cave-slime. This will be your paint. Your strokes are optimized—that perfect dragging of butter-beads across bread or putty-beads across stone, forming that primeval rectangular calligraphy—that shape we conjure when we brush lather onto a window, or when we exhume sea-stones to erect a dolmen—the finishing brush-touches the quoits that cap the megaliths. Sul tasto.

3. Fabius

No—we are in the business of negative capabilities: Konsadel, flaneur. Like you, Fabius. Cunctator. They called you a coward. You stood for nothing, so you fell for everything. No! With your men at your flank you recognized the faraway assailants with their pitch-burning stars in their hands, and you waited. You staved off recriminations and name-calling, little lamb. You were a coward and you were correct.

4. Hannibal

Baby you’re a firework; come on let your colors burst. The perfidy. Oxen-horns slathered with pitch, on fire. Your animals unfettered, spooked, scattering into the dark hills. Seething pechblende drips onto the ungular quick of the horns, and your cows tearfully rage, setting their courses on fire. Cause I am a champion, and you're gonna hear me roar—Selvaggio. It’s then that your rival observed those pinpoints bleed into ruin, and defeat. Ritenuto.

5. The Fermata

Nachtwachen. These are vivisected pictures, revealing the nascent preparation of the canvas. Something akin to these elastic cat’s-cradles resides in the hiddenunderneath-world of every painted surface, and one can only visit with more infra-rarefied types of light. They reveal the probity of the painter’s negative capabilities; how they would all appear if caught in medias res of their morphogenesis. They are Fabian paintings: taken to the exact moment wherein they exist freely of deceptions, in the unified field that subtends the genre.