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Confinement, Homage to Nicolas de Staël, 2024

Acrylic, Graphite Point

51.2 x 38.2 in

When the mirror turns into a pictorial wall: a place where the gaze circulates without finding an exit, revealing a mental space closing in on itself.

In this work from the Behind the Obvious series, Abraham Aronovitch shifts the bathroom mirror toward a space of mental projection. The figure, absorbed in thought, confronts a surface of color fields from which enclosed, complex, and uncomfortable human situations emerge. The homage to Nicolas de Staël does not appear as a simple quotation, but as a construction through blocks and chromatic density, erecting a true visual limit.

Within this dispositif, the mirror no longer returns the subject; it becomes a field of fragments behind which presences seem trapped in situations with no apparent exit. The gaze attempts to penetrate the image in search of legibility, but repeatedly collides with the logic of the block. Enclosure thus evokes less an external constraint than an inner state, where attention directed toward others reveals the confinement of one’s own mental landscape.

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