Tondo paintings often rotate around a perceptual game of attention. The curvilinear edge of a Tondo, always moving and always turning, continuously re-establishes the edge of the picture plane. This in turn invites a viewer to consider their point of attention. Sometimes it invites them to focus, other times to scan, looking for the balance between image and surface, surface and object, and object to space. ‘Decenter’ offers a variety of propositional approaches towards these dynamics between image, materiality and object-ness.

‘Decenter’ oscillates somewhere between focus and confusion, inside and outside, painting as a picture and painting as object. There is restless variety of visual and tactile application strategies throughout the show. Thoughtfully precise brushwork, poetic pools of color, quick flurries of spontaneous painting and beaded applique. While asymmetrical composition abounds, creating a dynamic array of images jammed offering a range of sensibility, from quiet to loud, coatings of monochrome paint and near photo-real sculptural paintings are also present, emptying out the center altogether and blurring the line between the pictoral and the object. In all, Dabin Ahn, Rachael Bos, Ben Cabral, Max Capus, Jake Fagundo, Andrew Falkowski, Griffin Goodman, Kellie Romany, Nick Schleicher and Kalan Strauss approach Tondos in ‘Decenter’ with their own sense of restless, quixotic attention.