Street Lights - Orange, 2025

Adam Wajerczyk  

A New York avenue set ablaze by the light of sunset, where the city seems to catch fire. Of the entire series, this version is arguably the most chromatically daring: here, orange reigns.

The composition rests on a deep central perspective. The roadway plunges towards a grey-blue distance where the buildings fade into a cold haze — the only becalmed zone in the canvas. All around, the façades rise as immense vertical masses of orange-red, vermilion, mauve and burgundy, applied in broad descending bands that streak the surface from top to bottom. These are not buildings described, but blocks of pure colour that carry their weight and verticality.

At the centre, a tall pink and lilac column cuts the composition in two, like a skyscraper bathed in raking light. This pale band, the softest passage in the painting, provides a breathing space between the two incandescent masses that frame it.

Traffic occupies a thin median line. A yellow taxi — an instant signature of Manhattan — leads a file of grey vehicles dwindling towards the background. Painted in a few confident strokes, without a single superfluous detail, these silhouettes are enough to establish the scale: they are minuscule against the immensity of the façades, and it is precisely that relationship that gives the image its power.

The lower half is given over entirely to reflection. The wet asphalt returns the city in long vertical runs, the oranges and vermilions extending downwards in liquid trails, interrupted by plum and black zones. Two pale diagonals, drawn with a bold gesture, cross the foreground on either side — pavements, kerbs, or simply lines of force — and contradict the rigour of the perspective.

The palette is pushed here to incandescence: saturated orange, brick red, coral pink, deep burgundy, with a few cool echoes — the grey-blue of the background, the turquoise touches on the car bodies — that keep the whole from tipping into monochrome. The grain of the canvas remains visible, the scrapings and impasto apparent, the material fully assumed.

From a distance, one recognises an avenue at dusk. Up close, everything dissolves into an abstract field of coloured verticals, almost Rothko-like. It is this constant oscillation that defines Adam Wajerczyk's painting: the city is not a subject, it is a pretext for light.