Todd Hido

Low in the gap between the bare trees, a narrow band of pale blue opens at the horizon, the single cool note in a field of ochre and umber. It is a small thing, easily missed beneath so much weather, yet it recalibrates the entire picture: the sepia cloud overhead becomes an event in motion, either gathering or letting go, and the winter thicket beneath it becomes a place with a before and an after. The series title, End Sends Advance Warning, asks us to read the sky as an omen; the picture is more tactful, letting that sliver of clearing keep its counsel.

The tonal orchestration is exact. Late raking light enters from the left and gilds the undergrowth in stages, from burnt grass to amber scrub to the near-white bark of the central trees, whose upper branches thin to lines as delicate as an etcher’s. Hido masses his darks low, in the tangle of downed limbs and briars along the bottom edge, so the eye climbs toward luminosity and then out through that middle passage into open ground, where a far line of small trees holds the distance.

Hido has long worked the margins of the landscape, often from the road, giving his pictures numbers rather than names, as a cataloguer would. His prints are held by SFMOMA, the Getty, and the Whitney. This one, an archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond, carries its muted register with unusual steadiness: the sheet lies flat and object-like, and the values, from storm grey to that last thread of blue, stay exactly where he set them.