"He called mirrors leaks. It amused him to pretend
that mirrors were holes between two universes."*

Leaks. Mirrors. Holes.

What of paintings?

They used to be windows. Windows until their surfaces got clouded over. Mottled. Speckled. Color falling apart in small little dots placed evenly next to each other. Disintegrating. The surface asserting itself. Or maybe they still are windows. Just that the world seen from those windows is no longer the world paintings used to open onto.

Or maybe they're mirrors. Leaks.

The surface of some of Cheryl Donegan's paintings is silver or gold foil. Mirroring. She scratches into it. One cut at a time. Criss-crossing. Opening up. Wounding the surface. Making an opening. Drawing the viewer in. Peering. An inverted vista.

Branden Koch makes paintings that look as if they are retrieved, brought back up. From a hole in the floor of the studio. Looking down into a well, finding, gathering, collecting. Materials he picks up on his way to the studio somehow, miracously, come back up out of this well and appear mirrored onto the canvas.

Jasmine Justice. Looking up from the full clutter of the everyday surrounding world, the sky, the limit, becomes a leak, an open space, never a void (Skyline, 2007) A decorative-almost pattern holding a prussian blue flat fullness (Skirt, 2007) A stage curtain pulled back to the 4 corners, of the world, of the canvas, opening a hole as a shutter onto the world of possibilities that exist nowhere outside of painting (Buzzbomb, 2007)

Another almost-decorative of folded cloth becomes a swirl of eyes, dervishing around a centered hole in Suzanne Joelson’s painting.

Actual cloth, cheesecloth, muslin, strips of cotton, pushing into the space the viewer is in, out of whatever is out there on the other side, the other universum. Built up, tentacled, gridded, arranged. Making the space in which the painting is experienced the hole. Dona Nelson.

The built up, there as well, in Louise Fishman’s camouflaged grids. Slowly. Over time. Filling up the hole that is the white canvas by circling around the holes left between the marks, the brushstrokes. Those small openings sending out rays of light, picking up color from around them. Each opening the tiny moment in between the two tides of breaths.

Gary Stephan hiding in plane sight. The in-between. The possible. Letting the stage do the acting. Making actors of the props. Folding onto multiple perspectives, opening up holes, leaks. Leaking.

Through the mirror of my eye.

In 2007 I brought together 8 painters under the title ‘Unlikely’. Here I propose another grouping called ‘Evidence’ painters reporting on the presence of the invisible.

*The opening quote is from Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions.