黑料不打烊

The paintings and drawings in this show, part of the series "On Display," depict vintage beaded purses that feature geometric patterns, abstract designs, and simplified shapes. With the purses posed flat against a neutral plane, they echo formal tropes of Modernist abstraction and play with concepts of surface and form, flatness and content, opticality and tactility. Each work in the series is a life-size portrait of a purse limned from direct, close observation. Covering just a few centimeters each day, the surfaces are slowly built up bead by bead, a painstaking process that turns facture into subject. The resulting granular images at once expose their constructedness 鈥� an aggregate of units that schematizes forms 鈥� and become feats of illusionism, each bead faithfully rendered, like a Zeuxis grape.

The full-frontal presentation of the purses aligns their patterned surfaces with the flat picture plane, equating the two and alluding to the Modernist ideal of pictorial flatness. The (fictive) beaded planes become stand-ins, miniaturized and crystallized, for Painting's material surface. Small in scale and finely nuanced, the seductive surfaces lure the viewer close and elicit an intimate gaze that is as much haptic as it is optic. They thus bring to the fore a kind of pictorial desire in which vision and touch are entwined, and they make the courtship between picture and beholder a central axis of the work. Playing with the metaphoric analogies between purses and paintings, the works pose purse as image and image as purse.