Gas

The Museum of Modern Art, New York (the USA).

Canvas, oil.

The plot presents a certain borderline situation. Time is on the border of day and night, and the place is between civilization and nature. The gas station looks like the last outpost where the human kingdom flows into the nameless kingdom of nature. The forest is mysterious – it rises like a dark wall in which it is impossible to distinguish a single tree. Pure white fluorescent light at the gas station, on the contrary, is almost painfully bright and understandable. This painting is an excellent example of an artist’s ability to turn a simple subject into a psychologically charged one. According to the records of the artist’s wife, they travelled in search of lighted gas stations at dusk. Hopper sketched gas pumps directly on the spot and then reproduced the details in the studio until he felt that he had come to the right compositional solution. So, this is a composite image of a number of such places. The person in the story of Hopper is a subordinate creature, a little living spark falling into the interior of an architectural or industrial trap.