Ching Ho Cheng, Grant Falardeau, Matthew Gallagher, Anthony Iacono, Elizabeth Lennard, Becca Mann, Alexandra Noel, Mel Odom, Soshiro Matsubara, Alan Reid, Josefine Reisch, Kazuna Taguchi Cupid’s Bow Curated by Milano Chow Mar 25 - May 6, 2023 Beauty is in the millimeters. Cupid’s Bow brings together artists who capture delicate mannerisms and gestures with a reverence for the handmade. The works engage with the intimate sense of touch, whether through a refined handling of line or surface or through the depiction of an anticipated kiss. This show is a celebration of beauty, sensuality, and a slowed down pace of looking. Mel Odom presents preparatory drawings of illustrations from the 1980s and a drawing made during the 2020 quarantine. His meticulous definition of lips, fingers, and hair imbues the figures with seductive appeal. There is a heightened attention to detail throughout the show, often with a focus on a solitary figure or object. Josefine Reisch dissects iconography in her painting of a Birkin bag that is fragmented into pattern pieces of pink crocodile and hardware. Becca Mann’s paintings and Ching Ho Cheng’s screen prints suspend objects in time, depicting a burning match, a cut ripe peach, and a cactus bloom that opens for a single night. Assembled from pieces of painted and graphite-toned paper, Anthony Iacono’s renderings of shoes and a pencil sharpener carry tension in their punctures and hard edges. Matthew Gallagher’s work is based in homage through patient observation. His drawings are on-site museum studies, sometimes made over multiple visits. After Zubarán takes form via his invented technique of transferring a vellum drawing onto molten wax, giving the image a fragile translucence. Kazuna Taguchi’s picture of a young woman copying a Velásquez also references the old masters. The photographers in the show, Kazuna Taguchi and Elizabeth Lennard, apply painterly gestures to their prints. Taguchi often adds a step of brushwork, seen in The eyes of Eurydice #23 near the torn edges on the image of an eye, which she then re-photographs. Lennard’s Gerard in a Shell is from her 1970s series Hommes-objets during which she photographed men posing like classical statuary and then delicately hand-tinted the images. Saturated with digitally combined gouache hues of green, magenta, and gold, the Femmes de Pierre series revives monuments to actresses and writers in Parisian gardens. Sculpting in clay, Soshiro Matsubara and Grant Falardeau share an admiration for aged and textured materials. Falardeau’s busts and figures carry faint suggestions of their faces, as if eroded by time. Gracefully propped up by wood and ceramic supports, Matsubara’s figures call attention to their own mortality. Alexandra Noel and Alan Reid’s enigmatic paintings borrow the directness of diagrams and signage but evade quick legibility. Noel includes two works on stone with patterns similar to her precisely painted gradients. Reid’s pieces combine eras of type, textile, and ornament like a reference book for style. His painting spells out the heart of the show: E-R-O-S. – Milano Chow, March 2023