ZACH HARRIS
Window Magik Pane
June 15 - September 14, 2025
Three large trompe l’oeil paintings aligned in a row, sharing through lines and compositions. Three paintings of paintings. Each painting within the bigger paintings is ornately framed and shows three palettes painted in light’s primary colors—red, blue, green—that overlap and fan out in different configurations like roving colored spotlights producing intersectional shapes and shades. Where they all overlap, there is white light. While all around them is black, the absence of light. The palettes are iconic—oval with a notch and thumb hole—but oriented and tilted in so many ways that their resemblance to an animal in profile seems as relevant as their literal referent and furthers the sense of fluid movement, mutability, and aliveness at play. Near the bottom of each canvas there is an electrical outlet depicted with a plug that appears to lead up behind wall paneling to the palette paintings, as though powering their luminosity.
Another kind of luminosity powers a fourth large painting, itself an oval, on the adjacent wall. A skyscraper-shaped candle sits ‘lit’ inside the oval’s bottom rim and points up to finely detailed smoke cloud forms, filigreed with tiny human figures in free fall and stippled with dots of color, that are carved in relief against a reflective copper-painted ground.
Prismatic light, rendered in paint. Two dimensions made to pass as three and three dimensions both flattened by ornamentation into two and designed to mock or confound depth. Repetitions with variation of imagery and motifs that necessitate double and triple takes. Wrestling with the real, the sands keep shifting and our eyes deceive us.
