Snake at Watercress XVI
€170.00
Out of stock
Watercolor on canvas
23.5 x 30.5 cm.
Signed
2026
Snake at Watercress XVI belongs to the Fuente del Berro series: another fragment in Watercress Park, Madrid, where a historic spring still feeds a ría, ponds and a cascade against the city’s noise. This sheet is less a body than an enclosure. The snake is there as a thought the water has not finished.
A dark, irregular loop—almost a tilted vessel, almost a hide—holds the centre. Inside it a single stain of indigo hangs and falls, a drop, a head, the fountain’s murmur reduced to one note. A pale triangle sits in the left of the loop, a chip of light or of stone. Above, a soft oval of wash, the basin or the sky coming down. A thinner curve slips in from the right, the ría continuing off the page. Two drips leave the vessel and do not return.
XVI in the title marks a return to the same corner of the park, not a replica. The earlier fragment was oval and lobe, a flank in Payne’s grey. This one is geometry under pressure: the garden’s quiet architecture, the path that contains, the animal that will not stay contained. Between reflection and reality the presence is still elusive. You complete the scales, the flicker, the certainty the park does not offer.
Pigment is dilute except where the loop and the hanging stain decide to be mineral. The paper is the air of the corner. No foliage. Only a vessel of line, a drop, and the slip of water that might still be a snake.


