The Brooklyn Rail

After a breakout contribution to the 2019 Whitney Biennial put Paul Mpagi Sepuya on the radar of next-gen photography enthusiasts, the artist’s New York exhibitions have been highly anticipated. Having both challenged and expanded the contemporary photographic canon in one hit, he simultaneously met widely held standards of beauty and fulfilled institutional expectations of theoretical inquiry. Sepuya’s presentation at the Whitney plumbed studio photography with a self-reflexive twist, seeming to approach questions around spontaneity, representation, and fiction through the realm of staged portraiture. Each image broke the fourth wall in fresh, unexpected ways and challenged viewers to reassess their own expectations of imagery.

At the artist’s subsequent show in New York in 2022, his first with Bortolami, much of his imagery hewed to the same visual patterns previously so well received. Thick black curtains with their upper edges in frame gave way to beautiful toned bodies engaging with various studio apparatuses: a hand taking a selfie, provisional backdrops made of two-by-fours, clamp lights clinging to jerry-rigged structures. Sepuya’s studio looked consistently airy and chic while playing its part in illuminating the aspects of image-making generally hidden in photographs produced for commercial consumption. Its floors were carpeted with worn persian rugs, plush velvet pillows strewn about for models to lounge on, and the artist’s work was sometimes visible on its clean white walls. Vast mirrors bounced light around the space.

For his second show at Bortolami, TRANCE, Sepuya once again leans on his established visual vocabulary, now remarkably recognizable as his own. However, within this familiar framework, he begins to engage in subtle formal experiments, probing the photographic tropes that have become the signature of his work. The viewer is immediately reminded of commercial imagery, where every aspect has been “styled” in Sepuya’s trademark way. (Some images, notably, were shot in the gallery space itself, which Sepuya transformed into a provisional studio, adapting his props to a new setting.)

In many of the new works, a spherical and highly reflective “gazing ball” takes center stage as the subject of the photograph’s portrait. Positioned at the heart of the artist’s workspace, the gazing ball offers a panoramic reflection of the photographer’s perspective, albeit with a twist—less Gustave Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio (1854–55) and more Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656), where the act of looking and being looked at collapses into one continuous moment. Other formal experiments emerge in the show: a few images are printed in black and white, others in their negative form—white where black should be, and vice versa. Two photos show mirrors with smudged fingerprints, evidence of where they’ve been handled (Roy Lichtenstein meets Christopher Williams). In the gallery’s center, the artist leaves the wall, with prints mounted on the same wooden frames that appear in his studio photographs, blurring the lines between his practice and the exhibition space.

Perhaps the most vulnerable and unassuming works of the show can be found tucked away in an intimate side gallery. Here the gazing ball reflects back the very space where the photos are situated, the room’s open door frame curtained off to serve as both a peephole for the camera lens and a privacy screen. In Gallery Gazing Ball (DSCF1919) (2024), a slender figure stands behind the ball, eyes downcast with a glob of spit suspended from his lips on the way towards his phallus, which he grasps, gracefully aligning it with the pole the gazing ball is mounted on. Within the ball, a second figure—also engaged in self-stimulation—appears reflected, splayed on the gallery floor. The momentum of their hands, their gazes, the spit, all converge toward the image’s center. This powerful, intimate moment feels both candid and staged.

The same pair (one of whom is here legibly the artist) appear in another image across this small space. Printed in negative, their naked figures face one another from opposite edges of the image, looking tenderly toward the gazing ball between them. Black and white, positive and negative, frontal and profile, looking and being looked at, here and not here: in these contrasts, the true originality of the image emerges, heightened by the formal continuities that pulse through Sepuya’s work.

Only out of this consistency do the artist’s somewhat staid improvisations shine. In TRANCE, Sepuya orchestrates his photographs like the conductor of a symphony, subtly elevating a single instrument out of otherwise familiar passages. These seemingly minor changes have the power to add depth and resonance to the exhibition. The formal elements of his works—the settings, the poses, the props—function in concert with one another, yet it is the deliberate choice to elevate one small element at a time, whether it's a new angle or a reimagined print process, that transforms the whole. Two violins in harmony can play a duet, but it is in the orchestral solo, the act of lifting a single sound out of a larger texture, that deeper emotional resonance is found.