Window shopping, mediated by glass, was always a virtual pastime. In French, the word for it is lèche-vitrine—literally, window licking. Born out of the revolution in large pane glass manufacturing in the mid-19th century, coinciding with the birth of modern-day mass consumption, shop windows structured our relationship with desirable products as first existing behind glass—visible, yes, but beyond reach. Concurrent with the emerging technology of the escalator, which further elided the distance between previously inaccessible spaces and retail areas, shop windows anticipated the computer and the smartphone as glass-clad shopping interfaces, where the desirable product is first encountered as an image, which we are invited to inspect and covet before or without ever completing the sale. Madeleine Hines’ works in “Residuals,” her first West Coast solo exhibition and debut with Cheremoya, carry product-gawking’s fundamental virtuality into the realm of painting. Her subjects—found images of shoe soles pulled from luxury resale sites—are functional in their origins, used by resellers to demarcate brand authenticity and indicate wear. Cropped and enlarged, these decontextualized photographs take on a pictorial dimension, which the artist studies, emulates, and accentuates, mining commercial minutiae with a kind of clinical wonder. There are half-torn barcode stickers, embossed size indications, areas of deteriorated lacquer. Emerging from backgrounds painted silver blue, jet black, carmine, there are moments of lightness, slow erosion, speed, even violence. Soles, in other words, are registers of residual imprints, be they accidental or quite purposeful—such as when savvy wearers key their soles for better traction. Hines’ interest in these images is of the window-shopper’s kind: forever suspending the actual purchase, she consumes them as virtual images, indeed, as paintings in their own right. Framed within the language of figurative rendering, they begin to take on a grotesque purposefulness, a ghostly intentionality. They are readymade painterly marks. Hines is aware of the irony here: paintings, like shoes, have come to live increasingly as virtual commodities on the internet—lingering in the flattened ether of gallery sales PDFs, social media posts, illustrations in online reviews. Many lament this fate, stubbornly arguing for all that is lost when painting is virtualized: painting’s ephemeral sense of presence as a concrete object, its magical ability to record and retain the presence of its maker. Some would call this commodity fetishism; others, like Hines, might draw a comparison to the melancholic aura of the second-hand fashion item. Not-new luxury shoes may have lost some of their sheen of novelty and, thus, their initial market value, yet there remains a quiet magic in the worn commodity, a fetish object marked by a body. Heels destabilize their wearer; they point and delay her through a negotiation of balance, comfort, and elegance. Still, it is the trace of vitality itself that is fetishized—the imagined clatter of a woman climbing up stairs, the precise clasp of an artist handling a brush. —Jeppe Ugelvig ‍ Madeleine Hines (b. 1988, Chicago) lives and works in New York. She received her BFA from Boston College in 2010 and her MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2014. Solo exhibitions include: “Residuals,” Cheremoya, Los Angeles (2025); “The Loved Object,” Situations, Catskill, NY, (2023). Group exhibitions include: “Manic Pixie Nightmare Drawings” (curated by Sedrick Chisom), Adler Beatty, New York (2024); “The Same Room” (curated by Brunette Coleman), Shoot the Lobster, New York (2023); “Summer Exhibition,” Alyssa Davis Gallery, New York (2023); “Family Style,” Situations, New York (2023); “Friends with Benefits, Estrella Gallery,” New York (2022); “The Last Day of Disco,” Restaurant Projects, New York (2022); “Onder,” Diez Gallery, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2022). Image: Madeleine Hines, Moderate Wear and Marking Throughout, 2024. Oil on linen, 72 x 108 in / 182,9 x 274,3 cm