Verbal Description: Gamaliel Rodríguez, Collapsed Soul, 2020–21

Narrator: Collapsed Soul is a horizontal ink and acrylic painting on a canvas that is 7 feet tall by 9.3 feet wide. The focal point is an exploding ship in the center of the painting. The use of color is striking. The bottom of the image shows dark black and blue water contrasted by bright white light reflections on the surface. The ship is a deep royal blue and faces towards the left with four windows, a tall mast and billowing sail. Two black straight lines extend from the middle into the water and from the back of the ship through the smoke, perhaps leading to an anchor. 

Smoke arises from the middle of the ship depicted in white at the center of the cloud and surrounded by splotches of blue. The shifts from white to light blue to royal blue and navy allow us to linger on the scene and the materiality of the medium. A halo of white around the smoke cloud and ship makes it pop and seem to glow. 

Black and gray gradations frame the scene and cover the sky and the entire border of the image with a soft smokey texture. This also gives the image a vignette photography effect which distorts the sense of time. Rodríguez explains, “I wanted to create one more image, as if it was between past and future, as if they were images of the 18th century.”