The Brooklyn Rail

Double Fantasy, Elizabeth Hazan’s second solo show with HESSE FLATOW, takes its title both from Hazan’s doubling (an improvisational tendency: these paintings start from spontaneous ink and watercolor sketches, giving them a certain looping rhythm) and from the final John Lennon/Yoko Ono album of the same name, released in 1980. If that album conveyed intimacy and reconciliation through collaboration and reflection, here Hazan’s thirteen vivid abstracts use the hazy, refracting nature of memory and dreams to convey the sacred, interconnected, and confounding nature of life itself.

The sunset kiss-scene Mating (2025) locks two warbly tree-topped bodies in an embrace not unlike that of the Lennon/Ono album cover. The lines defining their masses at first seem solid, only to expand and dissipate in various hues, as if they’re surrounded by a thick dense atmosphere that refracts from pink to near-yellow as the sun descends. There’s an undeniable stunned-before-lava-lamp effect to Hazan’s choice of radioactive scarlet, a relentless hue that’s echoed both in the smaller Field #197 (2026) and the complex root-and-tunnel system of Coffee and Oranges (2025). The latter, one of the boldest paintings of this set, combines Hazan’s tendency for verticality (trees grow; shadowy crevasses descend) and her spiritual affinity for ecology: everything, from the moon-grey rivers to the scarlet ground, seems to originate from and flow out of something else.

Like the album, Hazan alternates between soft, natural images, as in the peachy forms of Field #201 (2026) and Field #196 (2025), and a more intense, direct form of abstraction as seen in Field #184 (2025) and the glowing Alphabet of the Sun (2025). Alphabet of the Sun, an unfurling accumulation of almost protozoic line-forms navigating a concrete miasma, speaks from the dream world as a meditation on creation and replication, a twisting and often not-so-solid recollection of a handful of memories at once. Hazan has a sense of space and density that leans toward the poetic rather than the imagistic (the press release cites François Cheng’s “Empty and Full” as a key inspiration), allowing the sharp yellow background and the many hued lines of each strand to both mean nothing and everything depending on one’s vantage. Like in dreaming, where a bicycle might say “bicycle” at one glance before saying “telephone” at another, the painting’s rhythms seem certain until the outline of a bucket or a linear drip of blue forces one to reorient. There’s a participatory angle to this that’s hard to describe, but I stepped back, forth, and sideways at Alphabet of the Sun like a slowed down game of Dance Dance Revolution just to see it all.

Hazan strays away from linear time in the progression of these paintings, favoring golden hour hues and enabling her night-time scenes to whiplash one back to consciousness. Where Field #200 (2026) fills a moony dusk with thick dark trees or plumes of smoke—a rare triplicate in the show—Spellbound (2026) goes all-in as a dream-pop cover of Salvador Dalí’s Persistence of Memory (1931), with an opaque mirror stretching and surrounding its patch of dense brown forest while an ominous pink cloud forms in the center. Dreams are tricky, unreliable, but ultimately grounded in something noticed or unnoticed; often, it’s not what we’d like to dream about, nor what we’d like to avoid, but some third hard-to-translate place in the middle. What might be life-altering for the dreamer can be totally impenetrable for an outsider. Hazan treats this unreliability itself as material, and in surrendering control over association to the potency of her best recollection, creates a body of work with an overwhelming tendency to let you in, trip you up and mesmerize. It’s a testament both to Hazan’s reliance on reality to form these dreamscapes—and to HESSE FLATOW’s comparably small size for the neighborhood, a vital asset that forces these paintings into lively harmony with one another—that unlike hearing about someone else’s dreams, I was never exhausted by my time viewing Double Fantasy.