Everything is carefully obliterated, like the steps that lead to a secret place that cannot be returned to, since every trace has been covered. Only Smith knows how to access it, since this place belongs to him. It was he, like a divine geometer, who drew its contours. In this place, the sun is always at midday, at its solstice: there is no shadow cast to attest to the reality of what one sees, since an object without a shadow does not exist. Here, day does not rejoin night, night will no longer spill over into the next morning – everything is crystallized like a sliver of light stuck forever in the permanence of the world. Time is an invention of human beings, eternity belongs to the divine. Each image of Smith takes us back to a lost paradise where white light reigns supreme.

These passages together form an underground gallery in which Smith precedes us and guides us, but it is up to us to choose the destination of this nocturnal journey. Images like arrows shot through the centuries, tear the human sky and open onto an ancestral night of remote times. If painting is a “mental thing”, as Leonardo da Vinci said, Smith demonstrates to what extent art draws inspiration from the Platonic idea that precedes it.