In conversation with the two sculptures’ emphasis on the topographical aspects of gestural mark-making, Henderson’s three actual paintings on canvas are instead utterly flat and absent of textural variation. These paintings begin with an accumulation of countless layers of paint, each new layer covering and obscuring the previous one. Ultimately, Henderson finely sands away the surface, creating a palimpsestic network of colors that allows for later layers of paint to merge into earlier ones. The surfaces of these paintings are confusingly uniform-yet-complex chromatic fields that feel almost digital in their lack of planar depth. The paintings’ images portray a record of accumulation but the absence of a corresponding physical index is perplexing. To complete the works, the artist frames each canvas in a crisp bezel of thin oil paint, a kind of punctuation that simultaneously exaggerates the separation of surface from support while furthering an illusion of depth.

Lastly, the one photograph in the exhibition further extends the compounding logic of making and unmaking introduced by the sculptures and paintings. For this work, Henderson paints on top of a snapshot photograph before scanning and reprinting the image at a larger scale. With similar logic to the copper sculptures, here the original painted-over-photograph is discarded and the documentation becomes the final artwork. The resultant image—with an ambiguous shadow that provides an illusion of three-dimensionality—invites the viewer question the conceptual and physical space between production and display. What does it mean to create separations between the performance of painting, the object of painting, and the image of painting?