23. ELIZABETH PEYTON - A SPACE BETWEEN SUSPENSION AND FALLING.

Elizabeth Peyton: Angel - David Zwirner - LONDON.

Elizabeth Peyton - Elvis Angel (Elvis' Eyes), 2023 - Oil on linen board - 9 x 12 inches - 22.9 x 30.5 cm - © Elizabeth PeytonCourtesy the artist and David Zwirner.

Staring out from David Zwirner's Grafton Street gallery, a few dozen - forever young eyes - look on from their painted canvases - whose white primer drips down like birthday icing on cakes still warm from an oven, not cold in a box.

Paintings intimately small as if cut from much larger pictures - Elizabeth Peyton's Angels focus in and fixate - with the specific abandon of adolescence.

The artist's perpetual focus for a time in suspension feels palpably strong within this tender show. Her lost boys span history and geography with the bittersweet ease of youth and the foreboding of imminent change - A time-state like a spell, that stays with some for a moment, for others a lifetime.

An expression observed in Mai Omai's sideways glance, in a teenage Elvis - lost in thought and in the amethyst eyes of a stranger looking away - an eyeline we will never catch. And it is within this specific pain of the unrequited - which fill her works to a meniscus brink - inky and bright with the light of a storm.

This atmosphere of transition is felt in the dappled pointillist brushstrokes of the American artists' impressionism. The experimental outdoor scenes of the C19th French Société Anonyme des Artistes, whose ambition to capture the changing light En plein air, so too does Peyton capture the fleeting - in her daubs of colour - like the ephemeral makeup markings on the back of a hand in a pharmacy aisle or the marker-pen scribblings on a stationer's pad. Her pictures often bear such tests in their corners, a metaphorical reminder, perhaps, that we are all a work in progress.

Elizabeth Peyton - Angel - David Zwirner 24 Grafton Street, London. Until 28 June, 2023.

Special Thanks: Sara Chan.

Image photograph: Arnan Wang.