In Noël (1953), the sense of space emerges from black diagonals, traditional vanishing lines that carve depth into the composition. Further back, a grid allows light to filter through and suggests a beyond. The grid would become one of her visual certainties throughout the two decades of the 1950s and 1960s.

The rigor of the structure is lightened by the streaming colors: here, flashes of electric red shifting into orange, yellow-greens, and floating, vaporous whites.

These reds, with their energizing force, also generate space. The canvas seems traversed by a winter light that does not impose itself but rather surfaces gently, like a murmur.

Noël is not a religious painting. It is a meditation on light, a light that seems to emerge from the very complexity of the pictorial matter. Nor is Noël a figurative scene, it is an atmosphere, a vibration.

The eye moves endlessly, caught in a back-and-forth between order and indeterminacy. And it is this oscillation that gives the work its emotional depth.