Recent Work — Asher Liftin

Asher Liftin’s work investigates fundamental conditions of vision and visibility. Using his own photography as source material, he translates mechanical images refracted in a glass eye into meticulously hand-crafted renderings on canvas and paper. The resulting images both evoke and extend histories of pointillism and divisionism, summoning the tradition of painters from Paul Signac to Chuck Close. As in the art of Close, Liftin decomposes photographs into their constituent colors, dividing them into four hues—cyan, yellow, magenta, and black—in much the same way a modern color printer produces the full spectrum of visible chroma.

Yet Liftin’s paintings are anything but printed. Instead, they are emphatically handmade. Often, the mysterious matrix of lines and dots from which his images emerge appear almost woven. Liftin begins such paintings by putting down a medium-gray ground, onto which he carefully deposits layers of acrylic ink. He overlays successive lines of ink into grids, before breaking them down into multicolored dots, producing shifts in value across the canvas. The resulting paintings sit on the border between the human and the mechanical—the dots and lines dripping and trembling, revealing the organic hand that made them. This effect can be varied depending on the particular inks and viscosities that Liftin uses in a given composition. In Glass Pane, watered-down India ink softly dissolves in layers resembling watercolor. In Brooklyn Bridge , Liftin uses vibrant, viscous acrylics to produce stark contrasts in tone and hue.

Holding bachelor’s degrees in both Art and Cognitive Science from Yale (2021), Liftin’s practice is deeply rooted in the intersection between image-making and image-processing. At a distance, his paintings lock into place with near photographic clarity. At close range, they unravel, becoming luminous networks of colored markings that attest to the process of their own creation. This push-and-pull between the completeness and finality of the image, on the one hand, and the fragmentation of its making, on the other, is a constant. Liftin’s paintings produce this in a continuous cycle of resolve and dissolve, which changes according to the viewer’s physical relationship to the picture plane. In this way, Liftin’s works are simultaneously realist depictions and maps of our own cognition.

As the art historian Carol Armstrong has noted, Liftin’s work functions “in much the same way that our eyes, in concert with our brains, construct a recognizable image, from the ground-up, out of bits of raw perceptual data: something that is going on all the time without our being in the least aware of it.” Through this alchemical yet deeply methodical approach to image-making, Liftin harnesses this perceptual process toward his own painterly ends. The very facture of the resulting paintings and drawings encapsulates the essence of the process of seeing. Liftin’s paintings and works on paper therefore do not so much make the world visible, as they reveal the hidden processes that underlie the very possibility of seeing.