Let There Be Light

There is something intentionally wrong with the light in Aineki Traverso’s paintings. If it’s traditionally meant to reveal, her latest solo show, “Silencio en el Fondo,” investigates its equal capacity to obscure. Painted, impressively, during a monthlong residency as McLennon Pen Co.’s 2026 summer artist-in-residence, Traverso’s explorations of light, perspective, and spatial orientation unsettle one of painting’s oldest organizing devices: the horizon. 

Nowhere is light’s ability to obscure more apparent than in Lacuna, the first work the viewer comes tête-à-tête with. The multipanel oil painting, hanging alone on the wall facing the gallery’s entrance, is immediately recognizable as a landscape, yet there is something effectively unsettling about its familiarity. It’s ambiguous whether the painting’s point of view is meant to be from above, looking down onto an expansive valley; from a distant, elevated view; or simply depicting a geological detail at close range. The longer you look, the more each vantage point seems plausible. This simultaneous availability of several perspectives creates a kind of hyperfamiliarity: We recognize the spatial language of the landscape without being able to settle into any one position within it.

It is precisely this unresolved familiarity that makes Lacuna both weird and eerie, to borrow Mark Fisher’s terms. The former comes from the jarring sense of wrongness experienced when there is a glitch in our usual sense of perception, and the latter from the feeling that some orienting presence is absent. A field of bright light fills the center of the work and overwhelms the eye. Its source is indiscernible and the effect is more like photographic overexposure. 

Traverso also uses processes of removal, physically wiping and erasing paint from the canvas surface. Rather than making visible, the excess light and material subtraction wash out details that might otherwise help us locate ourselves within it. The title of the painting becomes particularly apt here; a lacuna is a gap, in this case produced as much by excess as erasure.

If our way of seeing is unsettled by the ambiguity on the two-dimensional surface of Lacuna, Traverso is specific about where the painting is located in physical space: She hangs it at her own eye level. That it is lower than the other works in the show is easy to overlook, but this formal decision suggests a fusion between pictorial and real space. 

The physical structure of another work, Last Day in the Garden, pushes this spatial inquiry further. The large diptych occupies the back corner of the gallery. Its two panels meet perpendicularly but are treated as a continuous surface, making it necessary for the viewer to turn with it for full viewing.

If the viewer is questioning where to orient themself, Traverso depicts the subjects and objects in an equal state of question. It’s deceptive, what counts as foreground and background, and both continuously materialize as porous classifications across her work. The same glow which illuminates the limbs in the lower foreground of the left panel also continues upward and into the “background.” On the other side of the same panel, a dark, abyss-like “background” appears as a fissure in the surface, seeping into the front of the painting. 

This spatial porosity is connected to Traverso’s treatment of material as well. She wipes away paint to create transparent passages through which layered images emerge and recede. In the corner of the right panel, an inconspicuous pocket of Caravaggesque candlelight is depicted. Its anachronistic glow appears detached from the illuminated face emerging from a primordial puddle nearby. It is as if the warmth of Baroque candlelight has transmuted and reappeared as a cold, white, and almost digital glow on the figure. Two incongruent temporalities often occupy the same pictorial space in her paintings.  

Traverso’s engagement with anachronism and the “afterlife” of an image isn’t confined to her treatment of light. In After Fragonard and After van Haarlem, she references masterworks including The Swing (1767) and Fall of the Titans (1588–1590), respectively. Both are known for obscuring the horizon line, but her blurred, abstract interpretations also seem to be experimenting with velocity and movement of time, compressing images of past and present. The inclusion of “After” in the title makes her references less about attribution than a temporal proposition. The paintings formally probe how we can understand the afterlife of the image.  

Across the 17 works in the show, Traverso loosens the coordinates that ordinarily stabilize the visual frame. If the horizon was once a device for fixing our position, it assumes a metaphysical charge for transmutation in “Silencio en el Fondo.” It is precisely Traverso’s instability – her blurring, erasing, overexposing, and reorienting – that allows her images to persist. 

This article appears in September 25 • 2026.