Lauren Quin at Pace

Lauren Quin, The Cold Vein (2025). Oil on canvas, 78 x 156 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Pace. 

How quick I am to name things! Take the other day, for instance. As we walked through the garden up to Pace, I caught a glimpse of Lauren Quin’s paintings through the window and thought: “Oh, great, abstract expressionism.” From a distance, Eyelets of Alkaline’s 10 large paintings, with their lack of recognizable figures and large sweeps of stormy color, hit a familiar register. I knew what this exhibition was before I even entered through the gallery doors. 

I walked up to a painting titled Pitch (all works 2025), a purple, gray, and black composition spanning most of the gallery wall. But what I found was not expressionism; it was physical vertigo. My eyes focused, then blurred, then focused again. On what, exactly? I had the uncanny impulse to treat the painting like an old Magic Eye book; my eyes crossed, expecting a 3D image to appear. When none did, I blinked and stepped back, thinking that I had seen a something, but could not grasp it—not an abstract emotional expression, but a real thing. Yet each time I tried to name what I saw, the thing would disappear again into canvas and paint. 

Quin layers her matte and glossy oil paints to create the sense of objects floating in sometimes sidelit (or is it backlit?), could be frontlit space. This is only a sense—Quin blurs subject and ground, never letting any one shape fully appear. The canvases are saturated with these almost-things, creating dense patterns like galvanized steel, or car oil on a blacktop…those found patterns in which children often see smiling faces. The resulting compositions hold both the imminent forms and me in suspense—I am seconds away from naming something! Fifteen minutes pass. Nothing. 

Lauren Quin, Eyelets of Alkaline (installation view) (2026). Image courtesy of the artist and Pace.

I give up and walk over to another painting, Eyelets of Alkaline, the show’s titular work. Grays, purples, oranges, and pinks swirl in tandem and then collide violently. There are perhaps one or two curves that could be eyelets, but could also be: an apple, a sandworm, a trumpet, nothing. The paintings play on my automatic impulse to look for symbolic meaning in the world, to “objectify” it. In the information age, this way of reading the world is increasingly common. Our vision is saturated with circulating images that demand interpretation. The meanings of these images shift so quickly that we must constantly define and re-define just to keep ourselves oriented. Ten minutes spent on Instagram is enough to know this. 

Quin’s work intervenes by disorienting us from our frenetic impulses to objectify. Her unnameable, indistinct objects ask us to go beyond the symbol, to remember that there is a way of reading the world that does not require words, and to cross our eyes once in a while. She reminds us of one of the tenets of visual literacy: the skepticism that prevents us from automatically lending power to mere representations. It was only when I stopped trying to name the paintings that they moved me, not through pontification, but through dizzying and direct action. I practically spun out of the gallery, and found myself on La Brea. What I saw I will not tell you. 

Lauren Quin, The Silk of Release (2025). Oil on canvas, 90 x 144 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Pace. 

Lauren Quin’s Eyelets of Alkaline runs from January 31–March 28, 2026 at Pace.

Sean Koa Seu is a writer, dramaturg, and critic. He writes about representations of the Southland in art, film, and literature. His work has appeared in The Rebis and in zine form at the L.A. Art Book Fair. He is currently pursuing an MA in Aesthetics and Politics at CalArts.

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