Oil on panel, 23 × 16 inches

This painting does not describe the entombment so much as what remains after it.

The landscape holds the event rather than depicts it. The sky is disturbed, a low seam of red running through it that feels less like light than something opened, or held open. The forms do not resolve into narrative. Instead they seem to absorb the weight of what has taken place.

In the lower right, almost beyond notice, a small insistence appears. A fissure in the rock, perhaps a tomb, perhaps only a place where light has not entirely withdrawn. The suggestion is slight, and uncertain. Nothing here is yet meaning, only presence.

The work sits in that narrow interval at the end of Good Friday. After the event, before any answering. A moment in which the world seems briefly altered, as if stunned into stillness.

“A painting of nature stupefied by what has happened”

Professor Peter Davidson, Senior Research Fellow, Campion Hall, Oxford