BOYS

The subjects, young men with bare upper bodies, look directly at the viewer, but with an expressionless expression. They are in rooms that lack any personal detail, but at the same time are too tastefully furnished to appear bureaucratic. What makes this series of portraits so unique is that Douglas paints people without being interested in the identity of those portrayed. Instead, in some works, the traditional grammar of portraiture is reversed: a houseplant occupies the foreground of a room, while the portrait of the young man appears in the background as a mural - it appears flat even in the imaginary space of the painting. Eliza Douglas, in rendering these various figures, outlines the conditions of a much more impersonal event, a kind of pre-transitive space in which subjectivity develops as just one quality among many.


I am a Fireball
2017
Oil on canvas
160 x 160 cm

Weird, the Real Kind (1)
2017
Oil on canvas
160 x 220 cm

The Foxes of the Morning
2017
Oil on canvas
175 x 200 cm

Window (Puppies Puppies 2)
2017
Oil on canvas
160 x 160 cm

Fruit Juice
2017
Oil on canvas
170 x 220 cm

How to Survive in this World
2017
Oil on canvas
180 x 220 cm