La nube

In the upper half floats a dark, elongated mass, with a tower and a plume at the right, carrying the silhouette of a ship. Its right end does not close in a contour: it breaks up into a swarm of dots — blue, ochre, white — that scatters upward until it merges with the sky. At the left, a violet-blue block holds the other end.

A blue-grey band crosses the canvas below and works as water and horizon at once. From the top edge hang very fine vertical threads, some of them dotted: from two of them hang striped balls and, from another pair of very close threads, a tiny horizontal bar. The spinning tops, by contrast, float free across the canvas. On the line of the band there are three small red carts on spoked wheels, minute against the mass above them.

The lower band is a deep brown occupied by ghost drawings: spoked wheels, wing shapes, circles and machine profiles, barely suggested in white and grey on the dark ground, like a frieze of contraptions stored underwater. The work is signed at the lower right and comes on unstretched canvas.