One Generation, Four Painters: The Records of Fratino, McKinney, Báez, and Nishimura
Analyzing secondary-market auction records of Louis Fratino, Danielle McKinney, Firelei Báez, and Yu Nishimura: how millennial painters reshape figuration.
Curatorial Thinking and Relationships Between Artworks in an Exhibition
Reading an exhibition through selection, adjacency, spatiality, text, and duration; an inquiry into curatorial thinking from the spectator's standpoint.
From Phone Photo to Canvas: Young Painters and the Reduced Figure
Examining the smartphone snapshot as painterly source: reductive staging, domestic interiority, and alienated figuration among millennial and Gen Z painters.
From Image to Story: Two Ways of Recounting the Human Condition
An essay comparing how painting and literature represent the human subject through perspective, temporality, and ekphrasis.
Biometrics and the Painted Body
Notes on how fingerprint and iris data entered my painting practice, and why the body keeps resisting measurement.
Mid-Market Figurative Painting: Why Do Collectors Return to the Face?
Analyzing 2026 art market reports: why collectors are shifting capital toward mid-career figurative painting and recognizable iconographies.
How the "Zombie Formalism" Label Thrust the Figure Forward
Tracing Walter Robinson's 'Zombie Formalism' coinage through the exhaustion of decorative abstraction and the subsequent decade-long ascent of figurative painting.
Working Notes: Macromania, Twenty Years Later
Revisiting the macro photography series from 2005 and what close looking still teaches me about scale.
Hybrid Figures: The Human Body Between Siren, Sphinx, and Tree Roots
Hybrid figures at the 61st Venice Biennale: dissolving boundaries between human, beast, and flora in contemporary figurative painting.
"In Minor Keys": The Figure Speaks in Whispers at the Venice Biennale
An appraisal of portraiture, mourning, and figuration within 'In Minor Keys', the main exhibition of the 61st Venice Biennale conceived by the late Koyo Kouoh.