Visited Tobias's studio ahead of our upcoming conversation for the podcast and got to spend some time with the body of work he has been developing (he showed me nine paintings made over what I believe he said was the past eight or nine months). It's excellent, inspiring work, so I'm getting some notes down here.

Firstly, gridding; these paintings establish a conversation with gridding that isn't so much a system as it is an ongoing set of suggestions around the reactions a system might imply. A—let's say roughly nine—quadrant grid is repeatedly alluded to and yet never exists as a graspable solid framework. Even in one work where the quadrants are quite forward, hard-edged, and visible, their form-defining borderlines tilt, skew, echo, and overlap such that the effect is something like pieces of paper strewn around a flat surface or windows containing ranges of seasonal or emotional states. In fact, (and I know I'm prone to bringing him up), I sense something of Jasper Johns's Seasons (1987) etching and aquatint works (and the totality of his work more broadly speaking) in these paintings in that form seems to be mostly utilized and dilated to open the door for focus to constantly shift and for something else to appear on the surface. And that something else might hint at locatable subjects, (in working titles and early associative thoughts, Tobias mentioned words like “reservoir” and “diesel,” and I do sense a kind of lingering omnipotent noxiousness), but ultimately passes them by as it moves around in search of new formal relationships to unpack. It's not purely formal work, but it understands its way in.

Tobias mentioned Manet with regard to his ability to deploy structures around figures that create a certain leeway for perhaps more experimental whims or marks to feel justified within those structures, and I get what he means while looking at his work (although he also spoke of confronting limitations, and I think Manet's were ultimately the cause of some of his weirder and more spatially confounding and therefore more timeless paintings). But in Tobias's case, as I've already alluded to, I think his freedom unlocks from manipulating the structure itself. And therein lies a sort of twisting of subject into content and back again that makes the work generative and fresh. In paintings beyond the aforementioned most delineated one, the grid collapses, rotates, curls, disintegrates, compresses, duplicates, and glitches. In these ways, one of the main elements being constantly negated is rigidity. Which is further enforced by the mostly pale, subdued, often muddy, deceptively gentle palette. I say deceptively because the work doesn't read as gentle to me, but it does read as unified by a considered sensitivity.

More thoughts to come, but that's a start.

“The General” by Bernadette Mayer, from The Old Style Is Finding out Something about a Whole New Set of Possibilities (1966-70)

Later in secret Later in secret the general Bends to remove something To lean against a fresco. The rules which run Around the walls The walls of court Determine a course, Declare if he had not:

Sulphur and pitch, sulphur and lead, sulphur and gum mastic, sulphur and varnish, mixed with the husks of pine-kernels, sawdust, isinglass, shells of snails, husks of beans, and seed of myrtle.

From here any direction is shown. The woods must be razed — resumption of growth The market growing, profusion, the question To hold — to hold Parts or acts in the act of disintegrating wholly. A sign over the hull — the evening In a complex of other evenings Behind the intervening ledge, the general.

The father of one of my friends is battling a terminal diagnosis and is nearing the end of his life; at the time of my writing this, it's entirely possible that he's no longer with us. Today, as I began the process of organizing and packing my things to move across the world again, I found a small folded rectangle of paper he gave me when he visited my studio a little less than a year ago as a prompt to stay in touch. One side of the paper, (the part visible as its exterior when folded, like a book cover), is decorated with a repeating pattern of uniform pale gold line-drawn isosceles triangles fit snugly together like puzzle to create an optical illusion of movement (like a mid-60s Bridget Riley screenprint). When the piece of paper is unfolded, neatly handwritten information appears in black ink in three stacked lines, each line offset to create a stair effect (ascending from left to right or descending from right to left). A perfectly symmetrical arrangement with the crease from the fold as its axis. The top line is his name, the middle line his email address, and the bottom line the website of a workshop he founded that he suggested I attend someday.

Visitors (working title): a small 8x10 inch painting of what began from seeing a peeling decorative vinyl house address number I saw on a Wood Green recycling bin. Became a kind of totem upright in the night (memories of standing at the base of Sankaty Head Light). Or a garden and a butterfly, or a fake garden and a projection of a butterfly, or two visitors trying to mirror each other (when done with intent, mirroring can be an important part of developing business relationships...), or embodied experience shifting into two dimensions (less time with the act, more with the storage). Serendipitously found a wax seal on an old envelope as the impulse to add an insect in flight arrived (it really helps to keep anything and everything around; ideas don't die but they do like to hide). Yena said she has been writing about seeing cicada shells on the ground during walks in her neighborhood. I could also say that this work feels like childhood revisited with new tools, or a compressed and frozen metamorphosis, or a record of an imprinting. So content is coming around (by which I mean I'm not even considering it anymore), but I feel that the materiality needs to hurry up and dissolve. I'll let this one stand regardless—it's an okay waypoint and painting is logrolling.

“As a very young man he had spoken of his art as “andacht zum kleinen” (devotion to small things). In the Microcosm of his own visual world he worshipped the Macrocosm of the universe. This was his revolution.” – Sibyl Moholy-Nagy on Paul Klee in the introduction to Praeger Publishers' 1972 print of his Pedagogical Sketchbook (1953).

Sharon sent me Carlo Carrà's painting L’amante dell'ingegnere (The Engineer’s Lover) (1921) and said both my work and his gives her a sense of arrangement and perhaps a musicality, which was wonderful. Painting as arrangement/an arrangement. Which also makes me want to re-consider modularity in approach.

Scarlet Topley and Ed Ruscha at Interval: had to ask the gallerist what Topley's association to L.A. is and was surprised to learn that she doesn't have any direct ties to the city other than being fascinated by it, because her work carries a very distinct LA-ness that makes me wonder what form it takes to non-Angelenos; to me it has something to do with internalizing a collective confusion from lack of access in the face of the city's unrelenting, shining promise (LA is half hidden). Or how desire there warps into hazy symbols pinged back and forth between its inhabitants at such a speed that they detach from their source and kick up into a kind of omnipotent mania. So the Ruscha pairing is a sensible, if obvious pairing. Which makes me glad that the show itself allows connections to take less distinct shapes. Topley's work Vox lux (2025, plastic mirror, etched aluminium, copper phosphate 3D printed pleaser) above the staircase leading to the basement was a particularly strong moment for me—its floating position, mirrored components, deconstructed-diorama form, and tiny 3D-printed heel warp scale and light and space and material density into something lovely and elusive, which plays nicely off of Ruscha's characteristic bluntness (two 1991 lithographs, If and Question & Answer are included in the show). The magic of his work comes from that bluntness simultaneously embracing and resisting a declarative quality, which is something I've been aware of in my own studio recently—there's real abundance to be found in wholeheartedly honoring and honing and concretizing unforeseen slips into ungraspable territory.

Draft (working title): I've had a few variations on a painting of a curtain reacting to a force (thinking of it almost like a gut being punched) lying around the studio for a while, and this may be the first instance of one working. I think the reason it does occurred somewhere in the process of two unsuccessful paintings merging to supplement and solve one. This has happened a couple of times now in the development of this recent body of work as I've begun to notice visual or sensorial similarities in seemingly disparate subjects. In this case, while working on the curtain, I had also been attempting to paint a cloud formation based on one I saw over Spiaggia Blue Moon in Lido. It looks like a large, flat, gray-blue mass of fabric billowing across the sky, like a flag or a tall stage curtain moving right to left, with a small tuft of white cauliflower cloud sinking itself into a wrinkle near the bottom of the form like a paperweight.

That little cloud turned black and ended up filling the role of the aforementioned force, and it gelled such that it now seems it couldn't have been any other way. There's something ineffable in those switches from arbitrary to surprising to inevitable that I don't want to try to define, but I will say that working with paintings as both streams and estuaries is starting to make more sense as certain subjects become motifs. And this also speaks to the potency of opposition and tension and friction (formal and emotional) as it relates to resolution. Crucially though, these relationships are not to be sought, but rather found or stumbled upon or recognized in the aftermath of getting to work. This approach feels important to remember and preserve, because observation still lies at the heart of what I am doing, not invention. Although, with that being said, there is also something to contemplating the modern pattern of widespread dissatisfaction with what is already in front of our eyes.

A lot of time spent with Redon's drawings this week. In his words: “One must respect black. Nothing prostitutes it. It does not please the eye and it awakens no sensuality. It is the agent of the mind far more than the most beautiful color to the palette or prism.” Woman with Outstretched Arm (1868) especially—the wind, the birds, the body, the earth all moving as one cohered instance.

On the morning tube today: very large, sweating, red-faced mother gets on with a toddler daughter in a stroller who is flopping around crying against her seatbelt. Both have Nirvana graphic t-shirts on. The mother: In Utero. The daughter: Nevermind.

“The Moon” by David Berman, from Actual Air (1999)

The Moon

A web of sewer, pipe, and wire connects each house to the others.

In 206 a dog sleeps by the stove where a small gas leak causes him to have visions; visions that are rooted in nothing but gas.

Next door, a man who has decided to buy a car part by part excitedly unpacks a wheel and an ashtray.

He arranges them every which way. It's really beginning to take shape.

Out the garage window he sees a group of ugly children enter the forest. Their mouths look like coin slots.

A neighbor plays keyboards in a local cover band. Preparing for an engagement at the high school prom,

they pack their equipment in silence.

Last night they played the Police Academy Ball and all the officers slow-danced with target range silhouettes.

This year the theme for the prom is the Tetragrammaton.

A yellow Corsair sails through the disco parking lot and swaying palms presage the lot of young libertines.

Inside the car a young lady wears a corsage of bullet-sized rodents. Her date, the handsome cornerback, stretches his talons over the molded steering wheel.

They park and walk into the lush starlit gardens behind the disco just as the band is striking up.

Their keen eyes and ears twitch. The other couples look beautiful tonight. They stroll around listening to the brilliant conversation. The passionate speeches.

Clouds drift across the silverware. There is red larkspur, blue gum, and ivy. A boy kneels before his date.

And the moon, I forgot to mention the moon.

From tonight's courthouse crit: Brassaï's Sculpture involontaire (1932), Richard Dadd, ignoring and then acknowledging the negative ghost of the positive image, marquetry (with respect to Airframe), flag design/art, witnessing on three different levels (seeing the fence, the experience of seeing the fence, and the painting itself), Hilma af Klint again, one sees the world once as a child and the rest of life is memory of that seeing, This Country (2017-2020), accumulated masses cohered, fortune fish, offering versus showing.

Went to the National Gallery in the mid-afternoon today—compared to peak hours, it felt like I nearly had the place to myself. Was able to look for a long, slow, uninterrupted time at some works that usually attract obscuring foot traffic. One of those was Vermeer's A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal (1670-2), with which I had one of those rare heart rate-increasing, periphery-softening experiences. It unpeeled itself in phases; first, the quality of the light. Unlike A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal which is directly adjacent to it on the left, the light isn't flooding in at a diagonal from the top left window in that classic Vermeer move. It's an after-dark scene, the window instead filled with a deep black, the light on the titular woman's face a soft glow coming from the direction of the viewer. It pulled me into an intimate, isolated, private mood (I remember a mental vignetting effect not unlike some adolescent memories of anticipating a novel sexual experience) until the work suddenly loosened like a buckled suitcase popping open. I connected this to Vermeer's deceptively loose and painterly marks—the tiny white pearl and fabric highlights sit high above their bases, of course, but most prominent instance of this looseness for me was the marbling on the virginal. It snakes around and slowly detaches itself from the image the longer you look (thinking of what Jay wrote/said about the gap between the site and the painting—this one widens). As does the sheet music, the decorative design on the woman's chair, and the folds of the woman's blue dress. And there is a dazzling range of blues on display in the picture, which gives it a pool-at-night sort of luminous coolness (and accompanying eroticism) that plays gorgeously off of the warm oranges, yellows, and browns throughout. Lastly, the woman's expression—I'm pretty sure this was suggested in the wall text in some way, but it is the case that Dirck van Baburen's The Procuress hanging on the wall in the background imbues the young woman's coy gaze towards the viewer with an extra dose of seductiveness that becomes more and more endearing, verging on comic. All of this swirls into something that holds a purity of transmission more concentrated than any other work I've experienced in a while. A joie de vivre and an eternal density.