The Brightest Wound in the Dark (27.6 x 19.7 in / 70 x 50 cm)
Medium: Oil, tempera, and paper collage on canvas
Artist: Justin Curfman
Dimensions: 27.6 × 19.7 inches (70 × 50 cm)
Year: 2025
Description:
The Brightest Wound in the Dark is a mixed-media painting that merges oil, tempera and layered paper collage. Part of a paired work that includes a poem of the same title.
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The text from the hand-written poem that is paired with the painting:
The Brightest Wound in the Dark
The stars observe—
Cold archivists of space.
Silent shapes hang like
Extinguished saints.
Each thin blade of light carries a word
Forgotten at birth:
Salt on my tongue in an abandoned room
Music dissolves
Into small, trembling colors
That rewrite the surf in wavering scars
A figure releases a swarm of electric moths
That cling to the flaking, wet walls
Of the surrounding buildings
Nothing is new here.
And you—
The brightest wound in the dark,
A box of light breathing in the cold.
Visitors drift through you,
Becoming part of the scenery.
Twenty years of this:
Silvered branches, frost-bitten trees
And dead insects pressed between the pages.
I go north
Toward the old gods
Who return only to reveal
Their unpleasant faces—
Cataloging our ordinary rituals,
Our ruins,
Everything rising, finally
As an offering to the clouds.
