Luco 107° — Watercolor on Paper by Caroline Lopez

About This Artwork

Until now, the series has measured time. Luco 107° measures space.

The shift is announced in the title itself. Where the timestamped works — 9h16, 9h17, 10h51 — record the hour of observation, fixing each work in the temporal arc of a single morning, Luco 107° gives us a compass bearing. One hundred and seven degrees: slightly south of due east, the precise angle of the sun's position as it falls across the terre battue, casting the shadows that have been the series' true subject from the beginning. It is the notation of a sailor, someone for whom position is not metaphor but fact, someone who has learned to read the world in degrees.

The effect on the image is immediate and total. Three chairs — fewer now, smaller, lower in the frame — sit small and pale against a vast rose-mauve ground that fills nearly two thirds of the composition. Two of the chairs appear to face or overlap each other at the centre; a third sits slightly apart to the left. They are rendered in pale blue-white reserves, barely present, almost dissolved into the atmospheric warmth around them. This is the most minimal, the most spacious work in the series: a great pale expanse, warm and tonally complex, out of which the chairs emerge as tiny marks, barely anchored, almost floating. The shadow stretches dramatically to the right in deep navy-indigo — the longest and most directional in the entire series — cutting across the lower third of the picture with the certainty of a bearing line on a chart, reaching almost to the right edge of the composition.

Le Luco — the name itself carrying the trace of the ancient Gallo-Roman quarter of Lucotitus that once occupied these slopes — is here transformed. It is no longer simply a garden, a place of leisure and observation. It is a navigable territory, readable by angle and orientation, its light a function of position rather than time. The chair has become a landmark. The shadow has become a heading.

In the wider arc of A Moment with You, this work opens a new dimension. After the figures departed, time governed the series. Now space enters. The question Where are you? has always carried a temporal charge — when did you leave, when will you return. Here, for the first time, it acquires coordinates.

The work measures thirty by thirty centimetres on paper and is registered as CLO0010, dated 2026. The artist's signature appears on the back. No certificate number is recorded in the dataset. The work belongs to the series A Moment with You.