IcyEt, by Leon Aarts, acrylics on canvas board

Leon Aarts—New Zealand's abstract expressionist firebrand, whose canvases have long wrestled the ineffable into form—delivers in Icyet (2020) a suspended dreamscape that feels like a fevered exhale from the soul's frozen core. This acrylic-on-canvas work, framed in crisp white and measuring roughly 24 × 36 inches based on the image's proportions, marks a maturation in Aarts' post-quake lexicon, shifting from the defiant departures of his 2010s output (like the exuberant Stepping Out) to something more liminal: a meditation on stasis amid flux, painted in the quieting wake of global upheavals. Uploaded to platforms like ArtMajeur and Infonews around May 2020, it coincides with pandemic lockdowns, evoking isolation not as despair, but as crystalline suspension—those titular "icy yet" moments where warmth flickers just beyond the frost.