New Paintings by Mark Viola

Through explores translucence, movement, and the act of seeing itself. Figures emerge and recede within surfaces that bear the marks of their making — not hidden, but held within the image, asking to be noticed.

The subjects span figures who have shaped culture and creative life: musicians, artists, writers, icons whose public presence is instantly recognizable, yet whose inner lives remain elusive. They are approached not as fixed images but as layered presences — each carrying a tension between what is performed for the world and what is quietly carried within it.

Text fragments, underlying sketches, and visible revisions surface through the painted image. What is typically concealed — the false start, the adjustment, the earlier mark — remains. These traces form a visual language that mirrors something true about the people depicted: that who we are is never finished, never singular, always in the process of being made and remade.

The act of painting becomes inseparable from the subject itself. Each layer added, each decision left visible, echoes the way identity accumulates — shaped by time, experience, and the tension between how we are seen and how we see ourselves.

These works don’t resolve. They stay open — suspended between presence and process, recognition and uncertainty. Through is less a destination than a threshold: a space where looking itself becomes the subject, and where the surface, for once, is only the beginning.