Snake at Watercress XVII
€170.00
Out of stock
Watercolor on canvas
23.5 x 30.5 cm.
Signed
2026
Snake at Watercress XVII is another fragment from the Fuente del Berro series: Watercress Park in Madrid, the old spring, the ría and the cascade still running while the city presses in. The snake is again only a portion—coils and pauses scattered so that the eye has to join them.
A pale, irregular loop occupies the centre, almost a skin left empty, almost a path the animal has already left. In the upper right a darker, wetter curve of indigo has real weight: a flank, a turn, the one place the presence feels close. Opposite it, a washed oval blooms and fades, water more than flesh. A small, dense lentil of colour sits low, a scale, a stone, a closed eye. Other arcs enter from the edges and do not explain themselves.
XVII continues the same corner of the garden without repeating XVI’s vessel or the earlier oval head. Here the body has come apart into climate. Reflection and reality share the sheet: what might be snake might equally be the fountain’s leftover shapes. Transience is the method. You are still asked to complete the flicker. The park still withholds certainty.
Payne’s grey and indigo meet the grain and stop. The empty loop is mostly paper. That reserve is the quiet of the corner—the air beside the murmur, the gap in which something may still be moving.


