Oh, yes, it will 3

I have been writing about pictures in this city for longer than some of our galleries have had plumbing, and I confess I approached this digital collage with the weariness of a man who has seen the double-exposure portrait done a thousand times since the 1990s, but it won me over anyway, the format familiar enough—a bald, bespectacled head-and-shoulders silhouette turned three-quarters away against a field of flat mustard ochre, the color of old varnish, a smoke-stained bar ceiling, a 1970s kitchen, pressing in from every side and glowing paler at the edges as if the man were backlit by a single bulb—yet inside the silhouette there is no face, only a brewhouse, polished stainless fermentation tanks, steel pipe, tall industrial windows, a bar rail and the dark legs of stools running out of the frame, while slashes of transparent red cut through the steel where the jaw and cheek should be like a vein exposed or a glass of something strong caught in the light, and what keeps the piece from being a gimmick is its refusal to explain itself, because is this a portrait of a brewer whose work has become his identity, a regular who has spent so many evenings on that stool that the room now lives inside him, or simply a meditation on how all of us are made of the places we return to, the fractured, almost lithographic texture in the crown of the head, a crush of tiny city fragments, suggesting memory compressing under weight, the glasses floating half outside the silhouette like a ghost of seeing, and at my age I recognize the posture, a man looking away from us toward something we cannot see, full of rooms he has lived in, and I’d hang it in my study, I suspect it would watch me drink, but then the picture shifts and the critic becomes the dreamer, okay, sit down, you have to hear this before I forget it, so I’m in this brewery, right, huge steel tanks, the shiny kind with the round hatches, tall factory windows with gray light coming through, sitting at the bar on one of those metal stools, and I look up and realize the whole brewery is inside a man’s head, like I’m in him, the walls of the room shaped like his skull and his glasses hanging out there in the air like a window I can’t reach, and outside him everything is mustard yellow, not a wall, just yellow, forever, kind of humming, like when you stare at a lamp and then close your eyes, and then these red streaks start sliding through the tanks, slow, like light through a glass of wine, except they’re moving on their own, and I get this feeling he’s about to turn around and look at me, I keep thinking, he’s not going to turn around, he’s not going to turn around, and then a voice, I swear it was the tanks, the whole steel room vibrating, says, “Oh, yes, it will,” and that’s when I woke up, my ears ringing, and now I’m painting it in ochre this afternoon, the whole background, no mercy, so want to come watch me ruin a canvas?