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Following exhibitions in Hong Kong and New York, Galerie Perrotin is delighted to present a new solo show in Paris by John Henderson. Notions of authorship and a questioning of the creative process are recurrent themes in Henderson’s art, central tropes that are subtly and enigmatically articulated and rehearsed through works in painting, sculpture, photography and video. Often forming a play of deceptive appearances, these works raise issues related to legibility, resemblance and translation. A series of metal paintings on display are in fact sculptures of paintings, highly detailed copper reproductions created using a casting method known as electrotyping. These ghostly painting-objects are distillations of the various signs and stages of the painting process—accumulations of standard painterly languages, textures, and indexes (impasto brush strokes, drags and scrapes, the grain of the canvas) compressed into a single reconstituted surface. The source painting is discarded, while the final copper object remains an afterimage. Henderson confronts us with the material properties of the paintings by making them absent and present simultaneously. This mise-en-abyme in the form of a simulacrum reveals the essence and foundations of painting as an illusionistic space, doing so by literally abstracting the painting itself.