This painting signals a deliberate shift toward distancing from recognizable figuration. Fragments of hands, eyes, lips, and lashes remain visible, yet they drift across the surface in an embryonic, unresolved state. Certain gestures hint at the iconic Creation of Adam pose, but instead of a single divine touch, multiple wavering and imperfect “hands of God” emerge—multiplying, hesitating, and never fully forming.
The work engages the Baroque through the lens of Andrea Pozzo, whose illusionistic ceilings served not only as spectacular optical constructions but also as visual instruments that reflected Europe’s expanding sense of itself during early global encounters. Pozzo’s compositions present a confident, centralized worldview, where Christian cosmology radiates outward as a universalizing force in the era of Jesuit missions and cultural discovery.
Here, that Baroque certainty unsettles. Gold dissolves into unstable shapes, bodies fail to cohere, and no architectural order is allowed to crystallize. Instead of a unified worldview ascending toward clarity, the painting offers fragments, contradictions, and shifting identities. Scattered faces and repeated, incomplete “Adams” evoke the historical moment when Europe confronted other continents and religious systems, and its assured sense of spiritual authority began to fracture.
The result is a kind of “oops” Baroque—still theatrical, still excessive, yet fundamentally unsettled. Everything remains in motion, unresolved, and uncertain, mirroring the tension and complexity of global encounters that Pozzo’s original imagery once sought to organize.
It is all that, and also just what my studio floor looks like.