The Brooklyn Rail

To “two-time” is to betray, double-cross; twice, double. Two Time, artist Soren Hope’s first solo exhibition in New York City, is made up of seven oil paintings, five monotypes, and one flipbook, which itself consists of some one hundred and thirty drawings—everything made in 2025. It is as rewarding as it is ambitious, and well worth navigating the throngs of Canal Street and the requisite four-flight ascent to the gallery. The lusciously-printed flipbook Bite, Sip, with a short text by Jennifer Pranolo, is available for purchase: a souvenir! And though only a dozen viewers will be lucky enough to take home an original painting or print, the rest of us are sure to be haunted by them. The longer you look, the more you’ll get. (What’s the opposite of viewer’s remorse?)

Five medium-scale rectangular portrait paintings make up the core of the exhibition. “Portrait,” however, is a misnomer. While these paintings may suggest portraiture—with their tabletops and seated amorphous bodies, identified only through image-residues of heads, hands, and other anatomical parts—they are emphatically not. Bodies spread across the surfaces of the works like liquid, like paint. Construction and dismemberment are one, but deployed toward a total effect that is less abject and more embodied.

Hope’s painted grounds are as important as their surfaces. The paintings are luminous, with translucent base layers that shine from within. Alchemical washes strategically muffle this light, creating deep space. Hope’s handling ranges across a diverse spectrum, from rudimentary to academic, from marks and daubs to vivid contours and shading. Yet the sum is cohesive rather than contradictory. It is the product of repetitive, iterative rendering. Through this prolonged process, the image reinvents itself. Limbs and anatomical parts punch through deep space of the paintings, emerging through a threshold of visibility.

In Shining, Shivering, Shrivelled, a forearm freakishly distends from the ether, placing its extended pointer finger on the tabletop in the foreground. In the upper right of the painting, another hand (the left?) raises a perplexing, undulating object. I hesitate to call this hand the left hand or the other the right because there’s no assurance that this is one figure. One cannot reassemble the parts to put back together a whole. The arms, anonymous, are “voided supports of an absent subject whose name returns to haunt the open form,” as Jacques Derrida put it in chapter four of The Truth in Painting, “Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing.” One desires to put their hands through these arms, as if they were sleeves, to put the body back in them.

In the other five paintings from this series, the arms are obviously detached from the rest of the visible body/subject. Heads, sometimes exquisitely rendered with detailed, belabored ears or eyes, are out of sync with the accompanying hand gestures. Such confusion stems from Hope’s choice of figures that cannot be reduced to individuals, but must be pairs, or perhaps even more than that. There is a childish and comedic game, often referred to as “helping hands,” where one person puts their arms through the shirt holes of someone sitting in front of them. The person in back is trying to embody, through hand gestures, the person in front, who, in turn, is trying to facially compensate for the gestures. Hope’s figures play this game.

All the painted and printed images in Two Time are defined by edge characteristics: figures in contact with each other and the edges where they come together. In the largest paintings, Hope’s figures are seated at a table. Above board they’re playing got-your-nose, while under the table, footsie. Anatomical legs are confused with the table’s own. Their figures, appearing as disembodied fragments (fingers, ears, noses, breasts, toes), emerge only at points of contact. The figures’ shared edges, inherently simultaneous, generate confusion; they transform from contours into gestures. One or two? Half or whole? In the realm of imaginary projection, paintings are a trap.

Traversing edges and thresholds, Hope’s painted images are muddied; their palette is mineral. Actions are enveloped in streaks, drips, and slips. But the current exhibition is not simply about play and (un)truth in painting. Neither is it only rewarding as a lesson in the craft of putting paint on canvas. It is instead about the social implications of the body. “Helping” hands backfire. Figures are intrinsically interpersonal, and the appearance of objects and people coming together is concomitant with the feeling of coming undone. The paintings are medium-sized, but they loom much larger in the mind’s eye. The experience of viewing this work, while cerebral, is in fact quite corporeal and empathic. Hope is a painter’s painter and, at their core, a worshipper of the figure. These paintings—as visual and haptic feasts—testify to these passions.