In You Are The Space Between, painter Joe Park has released a series of visual harmonies. Pulsating with energies he has quietly conjured and invited into his work over the last fifteen years, these transcendent paintings hover at the intersections of stillness and movement, anticipation and release. The works beckon to their viewers and inexorably bind them, for a moment, together, to the paintings and to one another through acts of shared seeing.
Park describes this latest body of work as “a world where all the energy and matter are porous and fluid, and where one thing is no different than another. I was reading Carlo Rovelli’s Reality Is Not What It Seems (2014), and was inspired by the realization that some physicists got to [theories about] atomic particles by noticing random paths of dust floating around a room! From particles and gravity to magnetism and waves, to quantum physics … they all renewed questions I’ve long carried about how any of this really works.”
These paintings are the zenith of what has been a consistent, multi-decade pursuit for the artist. In 2011, with equal parts humor and confidence, Park introduced “Prizmism” through an exhibition at Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco. Long interested in the relationships between observation, mark-making, and human awareness, Park, with his “ism,” articulated his unique inquiry through a painting technique that made visible the faceted, crystalline particles of screen-based seeing—a reality of the twenty-first century that has only proliferated since he began producing those dazzling surfaces. In the eponymous monograph of the work published in 2014, curator Toby Kamps notes in the introduction that Park had “merged recognizable subject matter with abstract representations of energy in all its visible, subatomic, and metaphysical forms.”
In the works (made in 2024–2025) on view July 13–August 30 at Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, Park has accelerated forth, a human Collider, transmuting his own energy into the visible matter of his paintings. Leaving aside representation, he nevertheless acknowledges in the title of the exhibition that the limbic system of every individual seeing the work will cast its own answers to the fluid possibilities of who, or what, lies within.
In discussing these new pieces with the artist, he referenced a newfound, or at least deepening acceptance of “the interconnectedness of all things,” a statement he later revised to “the interconnectedness of living things.” Having followed his work for three decades, and experienced the paintings on view, I challenged his revision, and he acknowledged that perhaps inanimate objects (including the paintings themselves) are forces of energy, and therefore offer the opportunity of some form of nonverbal communication.
If living and inanimate beings may have multiple dimensions (see Richard Bach’s Illusions, 1977, and theories on astral travel), our perceptions of them will be informed by our physical and emotional proximities—positions that can change with knowledge, time, and circumstances. Likewise, these paintings emanate a dimensional force that varies by viewer and by distance to the plane. Each surface belies the collision of two senses—sight alone is stimulated, and yet the intense desire to touch, to enter inside these portals and reach for what is hovering just beyond one’s vision, is palpable as viewers experience the work.
Park, a master of his chosen medium of oil and an intermittent college lecturer well-versed in the canons of art history, has created fields that nod to the painstaking work of the post-World War II Abstract Expressionists, and Mark Tobey’s White paintings, which first emerged in the mid-1930s. Futurism’s century-old frenetic belief in the supremacy of the machine—hinted at in some of Park’s previous works, and relevant to the current conversations around artificial intelligence—is bested here. What triumphs is essentially human, summoning the primordial in tandem with our ever-increasing understanding of the capabilities of the brain and how it relates to sight, memory, and movement.
Darshan, the sustained beholding of a deity, revered person, or sacred object, has been a part of the philosophies and practices of the Indian subcontinent for millennia, and has also found its way into Western spiritual practice. The experience is believed to be reciprocal—as in, the viewer seeing is also being witnessed by the entity being seen, and is blessed through that exchange. Are Park’s paintings sacred? They have not been anointed by a holy person or declared so by a canonical body. Yet in observing the paintings themselves, and people experiencing them, the first word that came to mind was darshan, because of the intensity of viewers’ interactions with the works.
This body of work both delights and destroys me. Piercing directly into our visual perceptions, the paintings awaken elements of the brain I have also sought to trigger in educating others about how deeply our personal associations contribute to our perceptions of the world around us. The paintings succeed, subtly and immediately, without the heady science my method seems to require.
Yet as a publisher of art and ideas, with a commitment to the fidelity of original works of art, I am keenly aware that the depth of vibration these paintings contain will never fully translate to the screen (that ephemeral world initiating Park’s dive into interconnectedness) or to the page. They demand a participatory experience, and so I must accept that I will never be able to fully possess them through reproduction in book form. My only hope is that at least a few of them land in public collections, and on view, so that others may participate in the conversation that Park has initiated through these works.
Joe Park: You Are The Space Between
Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR
July 17–August 30, 2025