There are paintings one admires, and there are paintings one surrenders to. Madness or Wisdom (V) from Caroline Boff’s recent series Ever Increasing Dance belongs decisively to the latter.

In this fifth work of the cycle, Boff has achieved something I find increasingly rare in contemporary painting: velocity without chaos, abandon without loss of control. The canvas does not merely hold colour — it releases it. Pigment seems to arc, collide, and spiral outward in a choreography that feels at once ecstatic and deliberate. One senses that every gesture, however explosive, has been deeply considered.

The palette is unapologetically high-key — saturated crimsons clashing joyfully with electric blues, bursts of citrus yellow cutting through passages of violet and viridian. Yet the painting never dissolves into noise. Instead, it pulses. It dances. The surface feels alive, almost percussive, as though the brushstrokes themselves are responding to some interior rhythm that exceeds the frame.

What compels me most, as a collector, is the tension implied by the title: Madness or Wisdom. Boff invites us into that razor-thin threshold where instinct and insight become indistinguishable. Is this abandon? Or is it mastery so complete it appears wild? The painting refuses to resolve the question — and that refusal is its power. It holds the viewer in a state of heightened awareness, where intuition sharpens rather than falters.

Within the broader context of Ever Increasing Dance, this fifth installment feels pivotal. There is acceleration here — a sense that the movement initiated in earlier works has intensified, expanding outward both spatially and emotionally. The dance is no longer tentative; it is centrifugal. The composition suggests motion that cannot be contained, yet Boff contains it beautifully within the picture plane.

Standing before it, I am struck not only by its energy, but by its generosity. It gives back what one brings to it. Approach it analytically and it reveals structural intelligence; approach it emotionally and it meets you with radiant force.

This is not a painting that decorates a room. It alters it. It alters the tempo of thought within it. And in that way, Madness or Wisdom (V) affirms Caroline Boff as an artist deeply attuned to the paradox at the heart of creation: that the line between frenzy and clarity is often where the most luminous work is made.