At Galerie Leu in Munich, Germany, Julia Selin presents Sun's Show — a set of paintings that unfolds within the condition of the afterimage, the persistent glow that remains when the eyes close after looking into light, where what you see is no longer fully outside you.
The formal method and the subject are the same. Each canvas is executed in a single, continuous layer of oil, worked while still wet. The image develops through pressure and movement — brush and finger tracing, pressing, dragging. Where pigment gathers, it darkens into a compact field; where it thins, light appears from within the surface. The palette moves between dense, iron-rich reds and bright passages of yellow. The resulting colour hovers in what Selin calls a "ghost colour" — a tone that feels simultaneously dewy and unstable, as if the image is in the act of settling rather than settled. Illumination, in these works, is not applied but released.
The paintings behave like recollections: they form and reform as they are seen. Several canvases rise vertically, exceeding the body; others remain small, close, almost held. Certain motifs return — branching lines, vertical structures, crescent forms, points of light — shifting slightly from canvas to canvas. In No stars, a tall narrow field is held together by a vertical structure that stabilises the composition without resolving it. In Anima, a central form extends and branches, recalling a stem, a spine, or a vascular system. The forms are precise without resolving into symbol; they hold the threshold between inward, diagrammatic imagery and the direct presence of the painted surface.
In describing his manner of dividing a painting, Philip Guston once wrote of Piero della Francesca: "The picture is sliced almost in half, yet both parts act on each other, repel and attract, absorb and enlarge, one another." The composition of several of Selin's canvases recalls this spatial logic — not by quotation but by structural affinity. The hand remains close throughout; the marks feel both deliberate and immediate. What they produce is not a fixed statement but a sustained perceptual state, where seeing becomes a way of holding something briefly in place before it changes again.
