Yes, figs.
As in the fruit, but also as shorthand for figures or figments. These figs are the product of the artist’s labor:
they cling to gallery walls instead of branches.
As figments, they invoke the irrationality of dreams. As figures, they meet us as corporal accretions of
elements drawn from painting’s storehouse of genres, or as masks: stern, mirthful, equally impenetrable.
In some figs, a form does double duty as both thing and void, as with Crux, in which a shape, irregular
and ancient, yields a view of a bat on the wing. Other figs present with visual relationships analogous to a
mathematical equation, a logic of anything plus anything equals something.
We are figuring creatures. Hand us a problem and we will calculate it into oblivion. Solutions though, can—
and maybe should—remain elusive. Some figs just are.
–Alice Tippit