Cole & Son | Tree of Life Platinum

This is Tree of Life on a fibrous printed base, and the ground does most of the work of distinguishing it. The paper carries a visible fibre in its surface, and the platinum palette is printed to sit on it as burnished metal sits on a worked surface, matte in the recesses, catching light on the high points, never uniformly bright. It reads as beaten metal leaf rather than as a shiny paper.

The design underneath is unchanged: the baobab, hand-painted by artists from both Cole & Son and Ardmore, with the fruits, flowers, birds and animals of a South African year gathered through its canopy. Reduced to a single metallic register, the drawing becomes more legible rather than less. With colour removed, the eye reads the modelling and the ornament on the creatures instead.

It is a straight match, so it can run as a repeating scene or hang as one tableau on a single wall. In a room with candles, low lamps or a fire it is at its best, since the whole point of a metallic ground is that it responds to moving light. Against dark timber, plaster and unlined linen it stays sober; against gilt and glass it becomes properly grand. Either is a legitimate reading of it.