Floating On A Postbox High – Venice is an original mixed media painting on canvas measuring 120 x 90 cm by Victoria Horkan. The tall upright canvas is built on a warm, sun-saturated ground of amber, ochre and pale gold, with an insistent pillar-box red massing at the right edge and pushing inward across the upper register. Across this field, printed collaged butterflies, monarchs in burnt orange and black alongside larger pale species marked in brown and white, are arranged in a sweeping arc that gathers densest at the top of the canvas and curves down both sides, framing an open central passage of scraped, luminous ground. Below the butterfly arc the surface becomes more complex: fragments of printed paper and collaged material emerge through loosely worked passages of olive green, viridian, rose pink, cobalt and lilac, so that text and image fragments are half-buried in pigment, like walls covered in layers of old posters.

The title carries its meaning in fragments, as the painting does. "Postbox high" is not a place but a feeling, the particular elation of sending or receiving something across a distance, of carrying a memory home in an envelope. Venice itself, a city built on water and held together by centuries of accumulated surface, becomes here a texture rather than a view: the collaged ground of paper, paint and fragment is the city's skin rather than its skyline. The butterflies gathered above it complete the picture, suspended high over a surface saturated in postbox red, transient and precise against the dissolving layers beneath them.

The contrast of material is the engine of the work. The collaged butterflies are crisp, printed and photographic in quality, set directly against a ground that is loose, torn and painterly, and the meeting of those two surfaces, precise specimen against dissolving abstraction, is where the eye keeps returning.

Floating On A Postbox High – Venice is a unique, one-of-one original oil and collage on canvas by Victoria Horkan, 120 x 90 cm, available to buy through Eclectic Gallery in Fitzrovia, London. To enquire about this work or to arrange a private viewing, please contact the gallery.