Case 015
the secret files of new york art detective
Walter Lin P.I.
Cartwheel: Gravity Bites
Thirty years. Time’s passed, but Cartwheel hangs there. Still. Like it’s waiting. I wonder if it’s waiting for me or if I’m the one clinging to it. An etching. Open-ground. A figure caught mid-motion, tumbling forward, but never landing. Youth. Hope. Maybe that’s what it was. Or maybe that’s just how I want to see it now.
The space around them—the emptiness—it pulls at me. Feels deliberate. Like it’s saying something. But maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s just blank. Nothing. And maybe that’s all it ever was. I used to think it meant something, this balance of movement and stillness. A moment where anything felt possible. But now? I’m not so sure.
Fractured Threads
I’ve carried Cartwheel with me. Not proudly. Not defiantly. Quietly. It lingers in my practice. A thread. A shadow. Themes—balance, suspended forms, identity. I see them. I feel them. But maybe they aren’t really there. Maybe I’ve pulled them forward. A fiction to make sense of the years.
Exuberance. Vulnerability. These are words I’ve pinned to it. But are they mine, or the piece’s? It feels raw, unresolved. Like it never quite landed. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe that’s youth, stretched thin and braced for the fall. Or maybe it’s just a figure. Caught mid-motion. Nothing more.
What’s Left
Gravity bites. Suspended moments snap under its teeth. *Cartwheel doesn’t just hang in air; it drags. A split second stretched too long, worn thin under thirty years of questions. It lets you step in, overlay your own reflections, your own fleeting seconds. But whether it was meant to or whether it’s me looking for clarity—there’s no answer.
Revisiting it is stepping into a dialogue between then and now. But the conversation’s messy, incomplete. I’m not sure what it says, or if it says anything at all. It’s simpler that way, I think. Maybe the shadows were always there. Or maybe I painted them myself.
