Cubist Skylines

pink buildings cubismThe cubism series is the calmest work in the archive, and the most painterly. There are no characters here — no Hatter, no Bond, no raccoon. The subject is buildings. The instruction is cubism. The result is a hundred and thirty-eight color-plane skylines that read as if someone had asked Lyonel Feininger to design a postcard rack.pink buildings cubism

yellow buildings cubisThe prompt mutations are minimal and exact. Blue buildings cubism. Pink buildings cubism. Yellow buildings cubism. Each color holds for a sustained run before Thomas advances. Then variations: blue buildings cubism with trees. Blue buildings gaudi style and cubism. Blue buildings with gardens in gaudi cubism. The Gaudí cross-reference is the unlocking move — once Barcelona's architecture-as-organism enters the brief, the cubist planes start to grow rather than stack. The buildings curl. Windows become flora.blue buildings cubism with…

This is where Thomas demonstrates that he understands what cubism actually is — not "blocky" but a flattening of pictorial space in which the eye is invited to move across planes that should not be adjacent. The strong images in the run honor this principle. blue buildings cubism with tre…Blue buildings cubism with trees (eight runs) is one of them: the tree-shapes do not sit in front of the buildings; they share the same picture-plane, so the city and the garden become one surface. Cézanne would have approved.

blue buildings cubism with…The color choices are not accidental. Bitcoin orange — the artist's house color — does not appear in the cubist series. He has reserved orange for the political work and for the bull-and-robot imagery. Cubism gets the cool palette: blue first and most, then pink, then yellow. The series is a kind of palate cleanser. After the loud rhetoric of the Capitol Burns cycle and the militant posture of Iron Bulls, the cubist skylines say: here is a city that is only about looking at color.yellow buildings cubism

The most ambitious experiment in the cycle is buildings with blue filters ov…buildings with blue filters overlayed by geometric (four iterations). The phrasing is technical — filter, overlay — and it reveals the artist thinking in editing-software terms even while asking the model to paint. The result is the most graphic in the series: photographs imagined as cubist studies rather than cubist studies in the historical sense. It's a younger artist's move, and it works.

blue buildings cubism

The weakest entries are the yellow runs. Yellow does not hold a skyline the way blue does — it goes flat under low contrast and pulls the buildings toward the sun. The cycle's diminishing returns sit there. Pink, surprisingly, is the strongest secondary color; the cubist plane handles pink like a wash and the resulting cityscape reads as Miami in fog.

blue buildings cubismThe collection sits oddly in the archive because it is the one place where Thomas seems content to let the work be only formal — only about color and plane and surface. There is no joke. There is no character. There is no covert religious or political content. He is, for a stretch of perhaps two hundred prompts spread across a few weeks, simply painting. After every other collection has shouted its argument, the cubist skylines are the quiet room.pink buildings cubism

pink buildings cubismThat said: the formal exercise is also a kind of staging. The cubist city is the backdrop against which his other figures could plausibly stand. You can imagine, easily, the Mad Hatter walking down a pink-cubist street; the cartoon raccoon perched on a blue-gabled roof. Whether or not Thomas ever combined the two on the canvas, the cubist skyline functions in the archive as a place his other characters could live. It is the world he has built underneath the figures.blue buildings cubism

blue buildings cubism

The cycle's lesson, if it teaches one, is that pure form retains its dignity inside an archive that mostly wants to be loud. The buildings are not arguing with anything. They are arguing only with each other, in three colors, on a flat plane.