Contorting harlequins bow and sprawl over pastel chairs, rugs, walls and potted houseplants in Sara Berman‘s paintings. Are these mysteriously leotarded people lost in reverie, engaged in awkward stretching exercises, or merely lolling indolently? It’s impossible to determine. Berman’s collage-like spaces and their peekaboo occupants are imbued with beguilingly puzzling ambiguity. Vacillating protagonists blend into stylish settings like animals camouflaged in domestic jungles of wallpaper and upholstery. With distinguishing characteristics concealed in diamond or flower print bodysuits, the humanoid figures morph into patterned interior furnishings. Yet their corporeal integrality is compromised by the spliced cubistic compositions they inhabit—with milieus that don’t add up; neither do they. Are the harlequins bending over backwards to conform to disjunctive realities? Or do their surroundings reflect their visions? A former fashion designer, Berman seems well suited to posing such riddles through painting. “Double Entendre,” her show at Anat Ebgi’s AE2, also includes embroidered pictures, abstractions composed of dryer lint, and a harlequin floor rug that playfully posits gallery visitors as real-life versions of her characters. Ultimately, Berman’s paintings are most provocative for alluding to the ways in which people seek to fit in but fail to, or succeed so well at adjusting to pressing demands that they shed their own individualities. Bleak aftermath, her lint abstractions present grayish fuzzy residue as all that tangibly remains from a day in bright costume. To what extent are our furnishings extensions of our personalities, and to what extent are our personalities extensions of them?

AE2 (Anat Ebgi)
2860 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90034
Show runs through Aug. 11