This large mixed-media abstraction, Courante in D Minor (after Bach, BWV 1008), translates the restless motion and interior tension of Bach’s Second Cello Suite into a visual counterpoint of form, rhythm, and emotional tonality. The Courante—whose title literally means “running” or “flowing”—is at once light and agitated, propelled by quick, asymmetrical phrasing. Its rhythmic instability creates a feeling of urgent movement restrained by gravity, a dance forever on the verge of flight yet bound to the earth.
In this piece, the shifting geometry and layered transparencies echo that duality. Gridded lines map a kind of choreographic notation—suggesting the measured pulse of the baroque dance—while beneath them, pools of smoky gray and deep carmine collide and dissolve. The surface alternates between control and accident, precision and improvisation. Fragments of graphite tracing and translucent washes overlap like musical voices weaving in and out of contrapuntal conversation.
The palette draws directly from the emotional language of D minor, long regarded by both Baroque and Romantic composers as a key of sorrow, introspection, and dramatic tension. It is the key of lamentations and unanswered questions—Bach’s Crucifixus and Mozart’s Requiem share its gravity—but it also possesses a muscular strength, a kind of stoic energy. Here that quality becomes a visual undertone: the somber grays and violets are repeatedly interrupted by flashes of red and orange, brief moments of release or defiance that mirror the Courante’s inner propulsion.
While the music moves in three beats per measure, with subtle syncopations that blur the bar line, the composition of this work likewise resists equilibrium. Planes shift off-axis, edges break and reform, and intervals of calm give way to agitation. What appears to be architectural order dissolves into gesture; what feels chaotic reveals an underlying rhythm. The painting thus becomes both score and performance—an interpretation of motion suspended in time.
In Bach’s Courante, sorrow is not static but kinetic: grief turns to energy, yearning becomes movement. This work aspires to the same transformation. The D minor tonality here is not a darkness to be escaped but a resonance that binds emotion to structure. Like the cello’s solitary voice, the surface speaks in layered phrases—some clear, others submerged—each tracing the path between loss and vitality.
Ultimately, Courante in D Minor stands as an image of momentum within constraint, an abstraction born from the disciplined ecstasy of Bach’s dance. Its tension is the very condition of its beauty: the knowledge that sorrow, when set in motion, becomes rhythm, and rhythm, when sustained, becomes the pulse of life itself.