Images, in a single conception, is the artwork of developing fictions. Working with, alongside, and towards conventions of portraiture images, Paul Mpagi Sepuya manipulates the gaps between picture and object. He creates, negotiates, and frustrates need and intimacy — viewers glimpse fantasy, however by no means fairly attain a state of full enjoyment of it. In TRANCE, his second solo present at Bortolami, the artist elevates this longstanding curiosity in toying with the medium of images right into a maze of repetition, seriality, and cross-referencing.
Two freestanding billboard buildings, collectively entitled “Studio Mirror Diptych (_DSF3596, _DSF3598)” (all works 2024) dominate the doorway to the exhibition. However they face away from the viewer, denying quick access. A billboard is a public monument that traffics in commerce and consumption, due to this fact eliciting identification, but right here they’re reoriented inward, suggesting introspection or intimacy. As we come round to the entrance, we see that these works seize the method of manufacturing: Older works are held on partitions beside studio tools, performing as props. The artist himself is depicted however disembodied, cut up in half by the hole between the billboards with solely the outer edges of his limbs seen. A mirror within the picture confuses any deciphering of depth. It’s unclear what’s being documented by the artist’s digital camera, seen on the proper fringe of the leftward billboard — probably us. The act of sitting for images, historically a passive place, is right here turned towards itself: the positions of spectator and performer swap off, dissolving the fourth wall and complicating a linear sense of time by which a piece is accomplished after which seen.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya, “Night Studio Mirror (_DSF1073)” (2024), archival pigment print
Communicative efficacy can also be thrown into chaos elsewhere within the exhibition. In “Night Studio Mirror (_ DSF1073),” we see the artist holding a chunk of material in entrance of his torso, documenting himself, his viewer, or an unknown third topic by way of a digital camera on a tripod. However a tilted mirror within the background beside him coyly reveals the artist’s bare buttock, opening up a brand new pictorial aircraft in addition to an area of need. The artist, making an attempt to cowl up his nakedness, is betrayed by the mirror — or maybe it was all intentional. If eroticism is the will for the unseen, then the digital camera at his hip, with its phallic rod and knob, stokes that need. This sport is reprised in works like “Gallery Gazing Ball (DSCF1919)” by which a gorgeous younger man (a collaborator? a lover?) seems to be disaffectedly downward, as if evading illustration, in entrance of what seems to be a reflective sphere. Right here, the phallic rod holding up that ball threatens to obfuscate his principally revealed penis, once more enjoying with the eroticism of the seen and unseen.
Psychoanalysis figures the phallus because the factor that we need however can’t have. In these photographic fictions, we generally really feel that we’ve captured that object of need — however just for an prompt, earlier than we notice we’ve fallen sufferer to Sepuya’s dazzling strategies of mirroring and misdirecting. The actual factor, he reminds us, won’t even be within the image.
Paul Mpagi Sepuya, “Gallery Gazing Ball (DSCF1919)” (2024), archival pigment print
Set up view of Paul Mpagi Sepuya, TRANCE
Paul Mpagi Sepuya: TRANCE continues at Bortolami (39 Walker Road, Tribeca, Manhattan) by March 1. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
