Leon Aarts – The Brush Off (c. 2002, oils on canvas) sold

A requiem in miniature. A single, guttering candle and a discarded paintbrush lie on a blood-red table like evidence at a crime scene of creativity. The flame is the last witness; the brush, the murder weapon. Painted in the same fevered year as his mask-like self-portraits, The Brush Off is Aarts’ most distilled vanitas, artistic passion reduced to wax and bristle, snuffed by its own excess. The silence is deafening.

The Brush Off is the stillest scream in Aarts’ oeuvre, a haiku of artistic extinction. It is the morning after the 2002 mask series, when the masks are burned and only the tools remain, cooling. Hang it beside a window at dusk; the real candlelight will make the painted one flicker in sympathy.

Score (out of 10): 9.1 A single tear of wax for every painter who ever blew out their own light.