Contemporary Portraiture

I first encountered Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s work when I walked into his 2017 solo exhibition at Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York City.  I didn’t so much view his pictures as I did stare at them, trying to reconcile the spatial constructions, to untangle the delicate knots of reference and self-reference, seeking to decode anonymous flesh of male forms, and trying to figure out where any given picture starts or ends;