Zeuxis fooled hungry birds with a realistic painting of grapes, but Parrhasius fooled Zeuxis with (a realistic painting of) a curtain, which Zeuxis assumed would be pulled open to reveal his rival’s picture. Zeuxis and Parrhasius, an arrangement of grape-flavored drink cans on a low platform at the virtual center of the exhibit, is concerned with the Greek myth of the two Greek painters. Something unclear brews between these deceptive sculptures, bland yet enigmatic for their discussion of semblance, reflection, encasement. The paper facsimile of a torn business envelope, as if the panther image was sent through the mail, implicitly contained the picture like the flimsy-looking pink box perhaps contains some delicate slice of self. The hand-copied panther looks in a mirror checking if something is in his eye – an animal aware of the symbolic nature of the mirror, a drawing of a drawing examining its own drawn reflection. The material trope of rarified pink foam is undercut, simulated in wood painted pink and blue, with a hand-drawn barcode label. Backman has mimicked decisions of craft and presentation with a simple trick of realistic representation, flipping the superficiality of the pieces on its head, and piquing my curiosity to consider the diptych as an imitation of its own surface identity. Everything hanging on the wall is a trompe-l’œil. There is no printout of the panther, or torn business envelope around him. Is this really where a highbrow artist has brought his craft to pose some kind of statement? A clear paral lel exists between the Pink Panther and Pink Panther insulation foam, yet he didn’t take the price tag off the latter, and the image of the former is just printed on LaserJet paper. Yet, there is no price tag or blue tape. The rest of the work is not nearly as straightforward.Īt first glance, I found the pink diptych, I’s and Other I, uninspired. Upon leaving, the first two pieces also feel as though the wrap up the experience, book-ending the show with an uninscribed book and scrap notes. While these seem unremarkable upon first entering the exhibit, they set a subtle precedent for Backman’s style and establish his source material for the rest of the work – the items pictured in Reference Index hung in his studio while he worked on the rest of this body, and inspired specific pieces in the collection.

The entrance of the exhibit is flanked by the works Tabula Rasa and Reference Index, respectively, a sculpture of an open white book and hyper-realistic painting of a wall tacked with paper ephemera.

The Brooklyn-based artist heavily employs lifelike painting and sculpture, not only as their own forms of conceptual art, but as a method of upending conceptual art into a clear pretense of itself. Backman’s current work is inspired by extensive contemplation of the relationship between reality and human-made representation, harkening back to some of the oldest and most fundamental stories of representation and perception in Western culture. Pink foam, artificial grape flavor, expensive perfume, wrapping paper: all are shadows of reality. Nothing from Conor Backman: The Other Real, a solo exhibition at Nudashank, is what it seems from a distance.

Pro paint shadow contemplative state