The Keller Gallery was on the fourth floor of a building that had once been a textile factory, and it still smelled faintly of the thing it used to be — stone and height and the ghost of industry — underneath the white paint and the recessed lighting and the careful temperature of preserved things.
Sofia arrived at 7:08 PM, took a glass of wine from the first tray she passed, and made a slow circuit of the room before committing to anything.
This was her system. You never walked straight to a painting. You let the room settle around you first. You found your bearings. You noticed which works pulled at you before you read their titles, because the title always changed things and sometimes you wanted to know what you thought before language got involved.
The exhibition was called Interior Distances. Eleven large canvases, all by the same artist — a woman named Hana Voss, fifty-three years old, who had been making work like this for twenty years in quiet productive obscurity and had recently, without quite meaning to, become significant.
Sofia had written a small piece about her four years ago, in a magazine that folded shortly afterward, which she had always taken as unrelated.
She made her circuit. Most of the paintings were extraordinary. Two of them were merely very good. And one — number seven, at the far end of the room, hung slightly lower than the others, which she suspected was intentional — was doing something she couldn't name yet.
She stood in front of it and tried to name it.
It was large. Maybe two meters wide. Predominantly dark — deep navy, almost black, with a long diagonal of something lighter running from the upper left corner almost but not quite to the lower right. Not quite reaching. The gesture of a thing that had tried and stopped just before arriving.
The wall text said: Unfinished Crossing. Oil on canvas. 2023.
Sofia looked at the title. Looked back at the painting. No, she thought. That's not what this is.
She was composing the argument in her head, the way she always did — not to say out loud, just to clarify her own thinking — when someone stepped up beside her.