The Reader

In The Reader, a solitary figure sits against a rough wall, their form blurred into shadow, holding books or a sheet of paper whose contents remain hidden. Above, a pale cloth stretches across a clothesline, hovering between the ordinary act of laundry and the theatrical gesture of a stage curtain. The red color on the wall introduces a note of disturbance that cannot really be explained, like a memory or event that lingers without clarity.

The act of “reading” and what is actually happening here is ambiguous. The figure could be absorbing information from reading something, or they might be merely holding reading material. The draped fabric could be shielding them from the world, or it could be exposing them on display like on a theater stage. The figure’s indistinct features deny individuality, transforming them into an anonymous person in an unknowable narrative.

As in other paintings in this series, instead of individual portraits, the figures become placeholders, archetypes caught between presence and absence. Here, the act of reading is transformed into a metaphor for interpretation itself: the impossibility of ever fully knowing what is being absorbed, what is being withheld, and what has already been lost.

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The Participant

The Participant continues the exploration of figures suspended in ambiguous psychological and physical spaces, where interior states echo against material surfaces.

Here, the curtain with oversized polka dots feels theatrical, almost like a backdrop. Yet the figure doesn’t “perform”; instead, she sits passively, gazing away, caught between being subject and spectator. Extending the theme of liminality, where moments are neither action nor stillness, but a charged pause.

The person is stripped of detail with her hair cropped short, face turned away, and body painted in flat dark clothing. Here individuality thus recedes, and she becomes more of a silhouette, like a placeholder for interiority, memory, or absence, rather than a portrait of someone specific.

The curtain dominates the composition, its dots almost swallowing the space. The tension between the flat graphic pattern and the draped folds mirrors the tension in my other works in this series between surface and depth, material and spirit, body and environment.

The figure’s gaze upward suggests longing or apprehension, but with the face obscured, the exact emotion is withheld. This ambiguity keeps the viewer hovering in the same unsettled space as the subject. Adding to the ambiguity is the strange shift in color and shadow along the floor and between the chair legs, more like an abstract painting than a representation of a person sitting on a stage. I believe the psychological dimension of this painting is powerful because it is ungraspable.

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Area 51

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The Rememberer

The Rememberer extends the tension between intimacy and distance, presence and absence. Like others in this series, it portrays a figure that feels at once grounded in material reality and strangely dislocated, seeming to carry an inner world of memory and enigma.

The carousel horse suggests cyclical movement, ritual, and stasis, as the woman exists in a threshold space, neither fully in the fantastical carnival nor in the grounded world, but suspended somewhere between them. This liminality echoes the other paintings in this series where figures embody states of transition, fragmentation, or quiet estrangement.

The background of glowing pink and purple sky, bleeding into the deep shadows, carries forward a heightened color which unsettles the scene. The flesh tones, pale dress, and white horse glow against the saturated ground, amplifying a push-pull of beauty layered with disquiet.

Like the other figures in the series, her posture is understated. It is passive, contemplative, almost emptied out, while the surrounding imagery vibrates with emotional charge. This suggests that the body itself is less a character than a vessel or archive for layered experiences and memories. This is also consistent with my theory of a “canvas as body / body as archive”.

The expression of the figure, distant yet direct, aligns with the ambiguous psychological space across the series. She looks outward, but her gaze seems to bypass the viewer, suggesting an interiority that resists being read. This inscrutability is one of the defining traits tying the series together.

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