Kat Allibe painted this canvas in France in 1989, at twenty-five, and left it behind when she moved to Hong Kong five years later. Her father sold the house. The paintings scattered. She assumed they were gone.

More than thirty-five years later Jessica Lupo walked into a church in Reno, saw a floral canvas on the wall, and asked the priest whether it was for sale. She researched the signature and found the artist living in the same city. The original frame was intact. So was the tape Kat had put on the back in 1989.

We did not set out to represent an artist. We bought a picture we could not explain, and the explanation turned out to be living down the road.

Allibe works in layers and then takes them apart. Paint is applied and scraped back. Surfaces are scratched through. Colour is buried beneath colour and reopened. Gold is introduced and then deliberately distressed. Subtraction is part of the method, and the evidence of it stays visible on the surface.

She paints to a written set of rules: never finish every feature, leave unfinished passages, commit to one unexpected emotional colour against a warm ground, hold to no more than three dominant colours, and let a third of the canvas breathe. Applied consistently, they make the work identifiable across a room.