Seeing in Blue" by Torkwase Dyson at Pace Gallery

Over ten years of diving and swimming around the world fuel this new series of paintings by Torkwase Dyson at Pace Gallery, a personal reflection on what the artist calls water's constant state of transformation. In "Seeing in Blue," tactile memories, diagrammatic drawings, engineering notes, and process poems written during her underwater explorations condense into canvases that investigate distance, light, perception, and planetary transformation. Dyson begins the process by painting on the floor, with atmospheric washes of translucent color that accumulate in layers before moving on to more precise geometric constructions, using cut wooden panels, ropes, and hardware to build her characteristic curvilinear forms—a tension between chance and deliberate construction that gives luminous depth to the space. Unlike the darker palette predominant in the artist's previous works, aquatic tones dominate this series: in "Interbeing Blue" (2026), titanium white makes the blues almost incandescent, contrasted by flashes of dark green and rust red. For Dyson, the beauty of the seabed also carries a political and infrastructural dimension—drilling platforms, artificial reefs, military posts, and acoustic surveillance merge, over time, with the natural spheres of the ocean, evoking a beauty that is simultaneously prehistoric, vulnerable, and threatening.