City Garden

12″ x 36″ x 1.5″
Mixed media: acrylic on birch panel with dimensional elements in wood.

The more overtly urban and architectonic works push this collision further. “City Garden” (2022), a tall narrow panel, reads like a compressed metropolis, a vertical stacking of black forms, red bands, and bright accents of orange, yellow, and muted neutrals. The composition has the urgency of signage, the density of a city seen through peripheral vision. Yet it also includes protruding elements that break the silhouette and declare the work’s physicality. These extensions, like small interruptions, are not simply sculptural embellishments. They function as spatial syntax, as if the city itself were pushing outward, invading the viewer’s space. The title “City Garden” suggests a paradox, the desire for organic refuge within constructed density. Côté’s work does not resolve the paradox; it makes it perceptible. The garden is not painted as foliage, it is registered as a rhythmic opening, an interval within the urban grid. The painting becomes a meditation on coexistence, on how the organic and the manufactured interpenetrate, and on how the body navigates that interpenetration.