Lauren Quin

In these new paintings, produced over the past year and a half, Quin has turned from an “overdose” of chromatic intensity toward what she describes as a “detox of color.” The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue from Pace Publishing, featuring a new text by the poet, playwright, and essayist Ariana Reines.

Formally, Quin’s compositions are assemblages, stitched together from previous bodies of work, temporally fragmented and sutured. In each painting, she collages motifs, symbols, and spatial logics into new unities held taut between stability and collapse. Time binds Quin’s works internally; rather than progressing forward, they loop, re-suture, re-combine. The result is a kind of internal yet inscrutable language that emerges across her oeuvre, an esoteric mode of meaning-making that feels almost mystical. Quin calls this “superstitious abstraction,” an approach guided by the search for moments of synchronicity and serendipity, which then suggest the next step in the chain of formal invention.

Quin begins each composition by laying down a ground composed of what she describes as “sumptuous tunnels of light,” expanding pictorial space with pattern and shape before working against it, “swelling up the space in the painting.” This underpainting functions as a clarifying step—a means, as the artist puts it, of “bringing forward what I needed from the painting.” Layers are then scraped back, exposed, reworked, leaving visible pentimenti that memorialize but also obscure the chain of her decisions. This letting-go is rigorous: to allow the painting to become high-key and chromatic, to coax it back to grayscale, only to allow color to re-enter in altered form. All the works in this exhibition passed through a similar cycle of “detoxification,” governed by this rule-based system of advance and retreat.

The spatial logic of Quin’s paintings is centrifugal and entropic. Tubular structures appear cracked open, their innards spilling outward past the picture plane. In Quin’s masterful command of her medium, the logic of space is itself stretched, split, and held in a state of productive instability. The body is no longer depicted but rather summoned as a series of interwoven surfaces, volumes, and interiors. “There is no body in an assembled way,” Quin says of these works. “I am interested in the body insofar as I am thinking about something as small as the glint of an eye.” The kernel of Quin’s paintings can often lie in such a tiny detail or fragment of everyday life, a piercing shard of sensation stolen from experience. Her paintings are soundings from the unseen spectacle of the minute, from the splendor of what swells into vision before disappearing in a flash, dissolved into the afterglow of memory.