Bracketing: Existential Relationship Series – Holding Space for Unspoken Dialogues

Medium: Acrylic on Canvas
Size: 4ft x 4ft
Creation Date: 2020

Bracketing (2020) is part of my Existential Relationship Series, created during a period when I was reflecting deeply on the invisible forces that define how we relate to each other, and to ourselves. Measuring 48 x 48 inches and rendered in acrylic on canvas, this piece uses hard-edged geometry to explore the spaces that both connect and divide — the psychological boundaries, emotional brackets, and silent pauses that shape our inner and outer worlds.

In this work, the square format becomes both a containment and an opening. The forms hover and interact, yet they resist collision, leaving deliberate gaps and thresholds. The use of subtle shifts in tone within rigid frames creates a quiet but insistent tension. These are not chaotic gestures, but measured ones — suggesting restraint, distance, and the unsaid.

Throughout the making of this painting, I found myself returning to the work of Donald Judd, whose minimal, box-like sculptures examine space not as emptiness, but as an active participant in the viewing experience. Like Judd, I am interested in how structure, repetition, and material can evoke questions rather than provide answers. Yet, where Judd’s works remain object-focused, Bracketing pushes into the emotional realm — using the language of minimalism to map the complexity of human relationships and the spaces that hold our contradictions.

Bracketing asks the viewer to lean into these gaps, to consider what is withheld, what is bracketed out of our dialogues, and what exists in the pauses between words. As part of the Existential Relationship Series, it is less about resolution and more about making visible the architecture of emotional distance.