There are paintings that call to be understood, and then there are paintings that choose not to explain themselves—but instead ask to be endured. Curtis Judd’s “Purgatory” belongs firmly to the latter. This work is less a painting than a psychic chamber, a stark architectural meditation hovering between confinement and transcendence. It evokes the sensation of standing not just in a room, but in a spiritual holding pattern—the liminal territory between judgment and release, isolation and awakening.

At first glance, the work is disciplined and formal: a minimalist composition of intersecting planes, implied doorways, and fading light. Yet under Judd’s hand, even this quiet geometry becomes haunted. A pale yellow glow seems to struggle against a suffocating field of darkness, suggestive of a battle between grace and despair. These two forces are not merely visual—they are existential. And they feel intimately familiar to any human who has endured loss, regret, illness, or spiritual inertia.

Comparative Context and Influences

“Purgatory” evokes the sparse metaphysical spaces of Mark Rothko, but replaces Rothko’s shimmering boundaries with more rigid architecture—a nod perhaps to Giorgio de Chirico’s enigmatic piazzas and shadowed colonnades. Judd is also operating in the orbit of Vilhelm Hammershøi, the Danish master of melancholic interiors, where presence is suggested through absence. Like Hammershøi, Judd is not painting people, but rather the rooms they cannot escape from—physically or emotionally.

Yet this work is not imitative. What sets Judd apart from these historic touchstones is his subtle control of light as emotion. His paint application is thin, smooth, and meditative, yet it holds an undercurrent of something more raw. The darkness that falls over the right side of the canvas is not merely shade; it is judgment withheld. Time stopped. Breath held. This is a painting that does not dazzle—it lingers. It does not perform—it waits. And in that stillness lies its unmatched power.

Maxwell Fontaine, PhD

• 48 x 60 x 1.5"

• Oil on Canvas

• SOLD