The Brooklyn Rail

For Joshua Rainer’s first show at Louis Buhl & Co.—Library Street Collective’s emerging artist imprint in Detroit—Rainer debuts seven new paintings on geometric canvases featuring hands clasping, grasping, and reaching—one’s hand being the embodied locus of touch, belonging, and communion. Rainer’s sincere and seemingly anachronistic interrogations of the hand, curiously warping, dream-like, and rendered foreign at times, ask viewers to reconsider the gravitas of recognition, if just for a moment.

The show’s title, Amo Ergo Sum [I love, therefore I am], reframes René Descartes’s maxim cogito ergo sum [I think, therefore I am] within ideal Christian ethics and in relation to the commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Set against stark white walls, Rainer’s paintings glow in ultramarine blue, a pigment first ground from semi-precious lapis lazuli, reserved for depicting royals and the Church, until the discovery of synthetic ultramarine. Rainer’s embrace of the pigment in monochrome as a self-imposed formal constraint attunes viewers to the deceit of hyperrealistic painting.

The underlying architecture of Rainer’s work is masterful draftsmanship. A Detroit-based artist, Rainer studied illustration before turning to fine art. In Reconciliation of the Vital & Perilous (Sine Qua Non) (2025), two hands grip each other by the wrist with apparent urgency. If these are the hands of one individual, the vise-like grasp suggests otherwise. In front, another pair of hands, one more aged than the other, encounter each other, perhaps in a mirror, but do not meet. The bilateral symmetry re-invokes the Christian dictate—to love one’s neighbor as oneself.

In most paintings, Rainer superimposes a vignette in grisaille from the parable of the Good Samaritan. Disrupting the symmetry in the background, the distorted image, like a ghostly pentimento, speaks from the past. The visual strategy recalls a well-known example of anamorphosis in Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors (1533), which, when viewed at the right angle, exposes a skull as a memento mori. Still, Rainer’s visions of epic connectivity supersede the historical to preach that through touch, we can come to know ourselves through one another.

Beyond platitudes of Christian fellowship, Rainer’s works, when considered at a slant, offer more nuance. In Determinant (2025), a wrist tattoo embroiders hands clasped in inverted prayer, inserting these works in present day. Fragmented like crystalline refractions, Rainer’s compositions transform his shaped canvases into portal-like lancet windows and shards of glass. They shimmer like optical illusions, provoking our visual certainty—yet another way of knowing. Are these one, or multiple hands? Is there a mirror between them? Amo Ergo Sum asks: if there is no mirror, might we sit with a more complex recognition of a dissimilar other, beyond symmetrical “likeness”? The results are sublime.