Created in 1967, Caradhras is an important example from Harold Cohen’s rhombus paintings, a select group of works from the mid-1960s in which the artist rotated the square canvas onto its point, transforming it into a diamond-shaped format. The rhombus would reappear in Cohen’s work several years later in his earliest computer-generated drawings on paper, placing Caradhras in a key position within the trajectory of his career. The painting reflects a period of intense formal and technical investigation, particularly in Cohen’s evolving understanding of colour, structure, and spatial organisation.

Borrowing its title from the fictional mountain in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Caradhras invokes an imagined landscape, perhaps informed in part by Tolkien’s own cartographic renderings of Middle-earth. Yet the visual language of the painting stands in striking contrast to Tolkien’s medieval world. Through its gridded structure, shifting geometric planes, and constellations of red and green dots, the work appears unexpectedly futuristic, anticipating the visual logic of digital systems and coded networks.

At the same time, the painting remains deeply rooted in the formal concerns of the 1960s. The rotated canvas aligns the work with contemporaneous developments in American abstraction, particularly the shaped canvases of Ellsworth Kelly, whilst its all-over composition and rejection of traditional foreground and background reflect the influence of Clement Greenberg’s theories of modernist abstraction. Caradhras is therefore unmistakably a painting of its moment, yet one that simultaneously anticipates a visual future that, at the time of its creation, still belonged largely to the realm of science fiction.