Tablets

Painted at the same time as Charles Gagnon's photographic exploration of New York's aging infrastructure, where he focused on decaying surfaces, demolition, graffiti and desolation, "Tablets" represents the traces of humanity left by the passage of time - a contemporary version of the hieroglyphics the artist saw when visiting the Egyptian and Sumerian collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The appearance of truncated symbols, the absence of a frame, and the rough-textured surface reinforce the illusion of the painting's support being a fragment of stone rather than canvas.