Louis Eisner’s eponymous painting depicts a ditch on the edge of a horse-racing track outside of Paris. Similar to Rhodes’ practice, Eisner here engages in a type of marginal landscape painting, through his emphasis on unremarkable geography, as well as through his (diminutive) use of perspective. Adverse to Rhodes’ distanced aerial painterly perspective, Eisner positions the viewer at eye level amongst the landscape he depicts, almost within the weeds and thickets. Such an intimate perspective emphasizes a notable lack of life in the painting, besides the foliage there is not a creature in sight. Ditch is a gloomy and atmospheric rendering of an ambiguous space: not urbanized, yet marked and altered by its proximity to developed land. Eisner’s landscape is dotted with white marks, which appear at first glance as glowing dew, or perhaps spider webs. The heavy handedness of this textured layer of paint as well as the brilliance of the white against Eisner’s otherwise muted and dark color palette lends the work a mystical quality, likening the trench off of a road to a portal or a fantastical, fictional location and finding mysticism within the banality of the agriculture.

Exceptional to the stillness and lack of human or animal life in Eisner’s work are the faint outlines of cartoon creatures and decorative floral arrangements which subtly emerge through the layers of paint. Remnants of the wallpaper Eisner paints atop are visible amongst the scene, hiding behind the ruffage. Eisner’s textured application of paint coupled with the glue which mounts the wallpaper to the canvas, and the vestigial texture of the wallpaper itself, culminate in a rippling effect across the painting. The various textures across the layers of Eisner’s work produce phantom architectures in the artwork, populating the negative space of the composition.