Instead of evoking the illusionistic depths of representational painting, San Francisco artist Ranu Mukherjee’s latest show “The Long Middle” at Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco exposes the painted surface as a complex and multi-layered series of screens. The scrims muddle traditional delineations between background and foreground, between abstraction and realism, and organic and machine-based mark making.
To achieve this end, the base-painted canvas is consistently veiled by semi-transparent saris, which are embroidered or painted and sometimes layered once more in a visual cacophony of shifting focal points. Underlying representational images—a human torso, or woodpecker, for example—aren’t immediately apparent, rather emerging before one’s eyes with time, furtive and often incomplete, from the fray of perception. Soft-filtering layers thus evoke the multitudinous suite of realities inflecting everyday life.
Any given moment is commonly made from a mishmash of personal and public digital screens, human-built environments, weather, foliage, social dissonance and memory. If Renaissance painting’s three-point perspective triumphed by conveying the world view of three dimensions, Mukherjee aims to capture the ungrounded barrage of surfaces comprising a 21st century subjectivity.
From their very first impression, the paintings ask to be looked through while deflecting the eye’s fulfillment. At 40 inches by 42 inches, for instance, “rare earth dream” (2026) mimics the shape and scale of a window. Two perpendicular lines on the surface cross at the center to further the effect of a window frame. Nevertheless—and as is common with most works on view—the horizon line one might presume behind this window is unstable. We are not provided fixed relation of sky and ground.
Instead, Mukherjee has painted a birds-eye array of gem-like stones that appear to sit upon the surface, as though the window is not a perpendicular frame, parallel to one’s face, but rather lying flat on the ground. The facets of each gem are articulated by intricate brush strokes, where we see the full effect of Mukherjee’s painterly impulse, further calling attention to the hand.
These gems are painted on a fine woven sari patterned with ranging fall colors: orange, yellow and brown in a woven pattern further emphasized by more embroidery that adds another texture to the already complex surface. In this way, Mukherjee literally highlights how any attempt to see or see through is necessarily filtered through patterns that infuse the overall composition with a standard of measure.
We understand the scale and form of the gems, because of their place between the window frame and textile pattern. A semi-transparent image of a green bugle horn and white outlined foot provide yet another layer of resonance.
In “healers” (2026), Mukherjee plays with water, sky and horizon, perhaps in answer to Monet’s “Water Lilies.” Here, the surface of the painting reads at first like the cloudy mirror of a pond, interrupted by clusters of bright green foliage-like marks. The illusion of this impressionistic space is nevertheless interrupted by a helix under-pattern printed on the sari, prominent throughout the composition. The helix motif could read either like an organic reference to bee hives, corporate or medical diagrams, or the cells of a digital surface revealing themselves in a glitch. A perpendicular seam cuts through one side of the picture plane, effectively shifting the proportions such that the initial impression of landscape proportion suggests a portrait.
Peering through these dimensional layers, one further catches the glimpse of a foot in repose, toes veering out toward the viewer, as though asleep or dead. And in this easily-missed foot, the gesture of wrapping the painting in diaphanous fabric gathers further meaning, as through the saris—shroud like—are covering a corpse.
Two of three unshrouded canvases, “when it’s too late to rush” (2026) and “when a witness feels unwell” (2026), feature subjects that, while clearly depicted as singular, portrait-sized and perhaps animal subjects, remain unidentifiable. Mukherjee thus refuses to satisfy the viewer’s gaze, even when works are uncovered.
A third, unveiled work is a fully painted and exposed composition of half-rendered cats, birds, the same helix pattern collaged in fragments to the surface, a water bottle, vase of flowers, tree-from, boulder-like blocks of dark color and foliage-like green swaths. The background is a saturated and shifting green-blue glitter and the figures themselves are often recognizable, but not quite resolved, often associated with different horizon lines, as through the figures were not rendered from a coherent material space, but pasted together, and mimicking the way artificial intelligence-generated images distort the body.
In these works, if Mukerhjee provides the underpainting other shrouded works refuse, for the same effective confoundment.
Rather than suffer confusion, “The Long Middle” is a gentle rumination on the subsistence of human and more-than-human relations amid systemic collapse. If the world we share is a product of a paradigm exhausted, new worldviews are needed to find health, equity and sustainability in the future. Painting must therefore change as well.
Ranu Mukherjee’s “The Long Middle” continues through July 3 at Gallery Wendi Norris, 436 Jackson St., San Francisco; hours are 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays; visit gallerywendinorris.com.