Leon Aarts – Spent (2008, acrylics on board)

A carcass of colour, flayed and flung open. Spent is the visual echo of a detonation that has already happened, its aftermath still twitching. The board is a crime scene of exhaustion: reds gutted to rust, blues bleached to hospital pallor, and a single white-hot bone protruding like a snapped femur. Painted in the shadow of the global financial crash, it reads as both personal burnout and economic autopsy, Aarts dissecting the moment when velocity collapses into void.

Spent is the sound of a system flatlining, rendered in the hush after the alarm. It is Aarts at his most surgical: no cathartic roar, just the cold autopsy of collapse. In his trajectory, it bridges the feverish masks of 2002 and the seismic abstractions post-2011—a hinge work where personal depletion mirrors global rupture. Hang it low, under a single cold LED; the shadows will crawl like interest rates.

Score (out of 10): 8.8 A post-explosion still life—silent, surgical, and quietly devastating.