From the series 'At the Café'

Sit at this table. It's empty for a reason — I painted it exactly like this. Two glasses stand as if two people just got up and left: either they quarreled, or simply reached an agreement, and there was no need to sit together anymore. What happened — you decide.

I very rarely paint Paris. It's too recognizable, too well-trodden, it's easy to slip into a postcard. But there's one café on the Left Bank where I once sat alone for a long time waiting for someone who never came that day. Many years later I returned and painted not the place itself, but the situation — what remains when a meeting either didn't happen or has ended.

The work is done in a cold palette of soot, umber and graphite blue, with a single warm accent — ochre glasses and a wicker chair. The background is deliberately blurred, the figures in the depth are barely readable, as it happens with people at neighboring tables: you hear them, but don't see them. For me this piece sounds like Satie's 'Gymnopédie' — very quiet, with a repeating motif, without resolution. Watercolor here behaves like music: something is pronounced, something remains unvoiced, and most important — the pause.

Sometimes an empty table tells more about a person than a full one.