Invisible Transparency

Adeptly alternating between a range of painting styles—including gestural, photorealistic, and pointillistic—Mark Flores blurs the line between abstraction and representation to capture and convey how we see and understand the world. An avid observer of his surroundings, Flores is interested in color theory, specifically the emotional, psychological, and physiological effects of color perception. In See This Through (2009-10), he presented his perception of Sunset Boulevard, covering the lobby wall of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, with 99 individual paintings pieced and gridded together. Each richly colored painting shows a fragmentary detail of the sites he has seen along the Boulevard: street signs, flowers, sunshine, mascara-laden eyelashes. As the work’s title suggests, Flores invites us, as he does in all of his paintings, to see the world through his eyes and to consider our own processes of seeing and perceiving.