A place that might or might not exist, built from genuine metal and layered light, its structure drawn by hand.
A CAHILLANE painting is not an image of a place but a coordinate: one exact location, at one exact moment, in a dimension parallel to ours. The luminosity is not painted but reflected. Genuine precious metal lies beneath every square centimetre; light passes through the translucent colour, meets the metal, and returns. The painting is lit from within, and it shifts as you move before it.
Each work begins as a mirror. A large panel is laid, sheet by sheet, with genuine silver leaf, or gold for the warm works. This metal ground is the light source of the entire painting.
Over the metal, translucent pigment glazes are layered in twenty or thirty passes, until the surface darkens toward night. Where few layers lie, the metal glows through like distant light; where many lie, the world sinks into depth.
Then the structure appears. Straight lines, engraved by hand through the colour down to the metal, build the wireframe of a world and its vanishing points. Some lines end mid-way; some run past the edge, as if the world continued beyond the panel.
A reversible conservation varnish protects the surface. Each work is marked, and sold with a signed certificate of authenticity documenting its materials and the precious metal used.
Genuine 999 silver, 23.75 kt gold and palladium leaf. Lightfast mineral pigments. Built on aluminium, to stay perfectly flat for generations.
