mike rowbottom

This painting is called Stay. And once you notice what is really happening in it, you’ll realize it’s a word almost all of us have wanted to say to someone, at least once, when it was already too late… A girl in a pink dress reaches out toward a man standing beside her, but he is no longer quite there: his body has turned to glass, so clear you can see the sky right through him. Look closely and you’ll find small yellow flowers and flecks of color still caught inside him, as if he were made of memories, while his face has almost dissolved, and behind them the sky turns into something closer to a dream. It was painted in 2022 by Reynier Llanes, an artist born in Pinar del Río, in Cuba, who moved to the United States in 2007, and anyone who has ever lost someone will recognize the gesture at its heart instantly: the hand stretched out a little too late, toward a person who is disappearing while you are still looking at them. Llanes often gives invisible feelings a visible shape, and here grief and longing take the form of someone slowly fading away. He never tells us who the man is: he might be a father, a friend, a grandparent, a love that ended, and because we only see the girl from behind, we end up standing exactly where she stands, reaching out toward our own person... All he gives us is that single word, the one we so often never manage to say in time: stay. He first showed it in a solo exhibition in Ohio, named after the secret the fox shares in The Little Prince, words that could almost be written beneath this painting: “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” I started my newsletter because the world is full of beautiful artworks like this one, and so few people ever stop to give them the attention they deserve. Every week I try to. If that is something you'd like to be part of, you can join through the link in my bio! Thanks for reading.