Aftermath is what is left in the room after the woman has gone. The lipstick, the statuette, the abandoned glass, the sheet still holding the shape of someone. These are still lifes, and they belong to a tradition four hundred years old: the vanitas, an arrangement of beautiful objects assembled to remind you that it ends.

The objects outlast the person who used them, which is the whole of the cruelty. An award survives the career it was given for. A perfume bottle survives the woman who wore it. What the industry leaves behind is a set of props in good condition and a name that becomes gradually less familiar.

This is where the exhibition’s title finally lands. The golden hour is the light these works are painted in, the era they mourn, and the personal after — what remains of a woman once the radiance has moved on to someone newer. The faces at the entrance were always already elegies. You just could not see it from there.

It is also the movement with the furthest still to travel. The same subtraction that empties a dressing table can empty a pool of its swimmers, a picture palace of its audience, a backlot façade of everything that was ever behind it. The architecture of pleasure, painted after the pleasure has gone — that is where this work goes next.