"Canal Saint-Martin” 🍊

"Canal Saint-Martin” 🍊

Jaime Carmona

Oil on canvas, 40 × 50 cm

Inspired by a photograph taken during a morning walk along the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris. The scene captures two students taking a pause from their day, eating and smoking by the water, casually inhabiting the canal as a lived, social space rather than a mere backdrop. What first drew the artist’s attention were the dominant greenish tones of the scene, reflections of water, vegetation, and winter light, characteristic of this part of Paris to which he feels deeply attached.

🍊 The orange appears as a personal signature and a symbolic element within the composition. Beyond its chromatic contrast, it evokes the season in which the scene takes place: winter. The fruit becomes a quiet marker of time, of the cyclical nature of the year, and of small, intimate rituals within everyday life.

The painting reflects on pause and transience: a suspended moment where youth, routine, and environment intersect. The students are not portrayed as characters with a defined narrative, but as figures embedded in time, inhabiting a fleeting instant that feels both ordinary and quietly enduring.