8 June 2025
“Charchoune is not so much depicting the world as conjecturing it, conjuring it up. Painting is itself a kind of construction work, he seems to say, just as a building is a kind of composition.”
More Merlin James, the week of Merlin James. But that's ringing clear to me, conjecturing and conjuring. That seems core to why this current direction feels so abundant. It's less the recognizable stuff of observed reality and more a kind of digested mix of the everyday optical and a developed privacy into something constructed, yes, but also preexisting. I keep repeating “outside of time” to myself and coming back to illustration-based work from my childhood: Red Ranger Came Calling, Falling Up—that lived-in staying power, a visual language simple enough to put pieces together in a young mind while appealing to the accumulated wisdom of a well-traveled body.