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.

Detail

Detail

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.

Detail

Detail

Detail

Intermission No. 50

This work occupies a quieter register within my abstract paintings that treat the canvas as a living body. A dense central mass of grey-green texture, scraped and pressed into the surface, suggests compressed sediment. Around it, veils of pearl blue and radiating fields of yellow shimmer like atmosphere, positioning the painting between earthbound solidity and airy expanse.

The surface bears the marks of time with layers eroded and rebuilt, gestures scraped across like geological strata. The painting is a body that is at once weathered stone and vulnerable skin.

In dialogue with other works in the series that embody fire, water, and flesh, this piece draws the viewer into a meditation on matter as memory, and how earthly deposits continue to shift, like a living thing, always changing based on a history of exposure to the elements.

Detail

Detail

Detail

Intermission No. 49

This painting works in a more fragile, flesh-like register, compared to others in the series. Here, the palette of soft pinks, violets, yellows, and greys evokes the skin of the canvas-body itself. It is tender, porous, and marked by stains or scars. The surface is textured with accreted layers that resemble both geological erosion and biological tissue.

By using acrylic on paper and canvas, the work emphasizes absorption and seepage, the way liquid material moves unpredictably, soaking into the paper’s fibers and then hardening into crust.

Conceptually, this painting suggests the threshold between life and decay. The surface vibrates between blooming (with its floral pinks and yellows) and decomposing (with its earthy browns and corrosive textures). This ambiguity resonates with the question of whether the boundary between the living and the non-living is as fixed as modern thought insists.

Detail