Rocket 99
Rocket 99
This piece doesn’t sit still.
It moves before you finish looking at it — energy compressing, igniting, breaking loose. There’s no horizon line, no ground. Just thrust. Motion. Lift.
The form rockets upward and outward at the same time, angling like a jet in climb. That angle matters. It’s not drifting. It’s committing. Once the motion starts, there’s no returning to stillness.
The image pushes almost all the way to the right edge — 99% — and then stops. It doesn’t touch. That near-contact creates tension. If it reached the edge, the motion would resolve. Because it doesn’t, the motion continues beyond the frame, carried by the viewer instead. The eye keeps going. The energy stays alive.
Color burns hot against black space, not as decoration, but as velocity. The black isn’t emptiness — it’s resistance. Something to push against. Paper deepens this effect. The blacks feel heavier. The light feels denser. What looked like motion on a screen becomes force when printed.
The edges tear, smear, stretch. That isn’t accident or imperfection. Movement isn’t clean. Takeoff never is.
Hidden inside the abstraction is something familiar: the structure of a guitar, the gesture of a hand. Not illustrated. Not announced. They’re present as truth rather than subject. Some viewers will feel them before they see them. Some will see them suddenly, later. Some will never see them at all — and the piece still works.
That ambiguity is intentional. The image isn’t asking to be decoded. It’s asking to be experienced.
Rocket 99 lives in the split second where everything commits — when momentum outweighs gravity, when hesitation disappears, when staying still is no longer an option.
It isn’t about where it’s going.
It’s about leaving.