While technically strictly paintings, a new suite of large-scale portraits by YoYo Lander involve extensive collage—crucially, collage executed not from spliced photographs or culled ephemera, but from an endless trove of her own watercolor washes on paper. While in a sense likeness is not the goal of these almost lifesize standing figures (the model’s back is turned in each pose, and we never see her face), a kind of conjured naturalism gives the works the presence of the real person who stood for them. Without access to the model’s facial expressions, the viewer has only recourse to her body language to interpret the stories of the depicted emotional moments. Satisfyingly, Lander’s gift for rendering and the embodied physicality of her technique imbue the figures with the solidity and gravitas to carry those stories.

From near-ivory beige to warm ebony and hundreds of gorgeous, rich palette points along the way; from coffee to earth, wood, gems and stone; from reddish to bluish and pink-tinged, lavender, deep olive, cream and amber, Lander engineers a literal symphony of shades of brown and organic textures within the individual washes she prepares before she composes. This mise en place is cut into a panoply of slivers, slices and crescents, which Lander then assembles as though leaves or scales, petals or bark, into the fleshy contours and glowing skin of her subjects. This process not only gives an affecting dimensionality to the figures, but also creates a lively glimmer of reflection and shadow that heightens the realism even as it amplifies the elements of abstract expressionism that comprise it.

YoYo Lander, Installation view, 2021. Courtesy The Know Contemporary.

Simple anatomical moments like wrinkled elbows and trimmed nails draw empathetic attention within the painterly surfaces of the images, while a combination of titles and poses assert specifics of persona. It has been said that if you want to understand the action in a painting, enact the protagonist’s pose with your own body and let your sense memory inform what might be the mood the pose expresses. That strategy definitely works here for interpreting the slopes and angles of the spine and the limbs, the shifting of curved centers of gravity, the variations in stance like the steps of a dance, the relatable motions of walking or being planted firmly in place, the arms and hands that encircle, stretch, protect, invite, and refuse.

All the paintings are possessed of the same deceptive simplicity and relaxed elegance, but in works with more complex actions like the arms clasped behind the head in FULL Bloom (all works: stained, washed and collaged watercolor on paper, 2021, 42 x 66 inches), the empowered akimbo of Thank You For Your Time, the vulnerability of the self-hug in A Room with No Doors, and the you-deserve-it sashay of Been There, Done That, the audience is drawn even further into the story of this mood cycle which in its totality, as well as in its physicality, speaks directly to the nuances of life’s experiences.