Esther II
Laurel Gitlen, New York
May 6 - 10 2025

Press Release:

The first painting traces an encounter in the home and studio of two artists—shaped by invitation, hospitality, and the threshold between domestic and working space. Its subject emerged from an incidental arrangement of glassware atop their refrigerator: objects valued not for symbolism, but for their precarious, luminous, provisional presence.

The painting opens a relational field shaped by the slow logic of domestic accumulation. The vessels act as affective carriers—transmitting the felt experience of proximity and care. Less still-life than compositional event, they index improvisation, attention, and entanglement within artistic, and economic networks. As a relay, the painting carries forward its conditions of making—studio visit, photographic framing, painterly translation—into a future moment of viewing.

The second painting returns to a 2016 image taken during a visit to a gallerist's home in Brescia. This visit centered on a potential commission that, though partially realized, ultimately fell away. The work is based not on the intended subject, but a peripheral scene: a Sottsass Murmansk Centerpiece atop The Structures Tremble, flanked by a marble fireplace and architectural trim.

Re-engaging this image is a reparative gesture—reactivating a chain of affective, institutional, and material conditions that were paused rather than concluded. The painting metabolizes a suspended charge, finding productivity in the incomplete. As in other works, the subject is neither fully present nor absent.The Sottsass forms—both ornamental and infrastructural—act not as symbols but as agents within a network of design, patronage, and staging. The work resists closure, reactivating what was once peripheral into a renewed, altered connection.

In both paintings, minor gestures become sites of significance. One traces a quiet encounter; the other, a peripheral moment in a deferred commission. Each turns to the overlooked and unresolved as carriers of meaning, privileging shifts in attention over grand narratives. The aim is not resolution, but the continuity of relation—unfinished, affective, and still taking form. 

MW, 2025