Part 3 of 4: The Doubt That Changed What We See
There is a quiet moment in the history of painting when something begins to shift.
Not dramatically. Not all at once.
But enough that, once it happens, it cannot be undone.
Up until that point, painting had largely operated under an agreement. However expressive or interpretive it became, there was still an underlying trust that the world could be understood through observation. That space would hold. That objects would remain intact. That what we see could, in some fundamental way, be relied upon.
And then that certainty begins to loosen.
In Part 2, we see this tension begin to emerge in Christine Lorenz’s work. Structure is still present. Space still exists. But it no longer feels entirely fixed. There is a subtle instability, an awareness that what we are seeing may not be as settled as it first appears.
That feeling has a longer history.
“untitled” by Christine Lorenz
At the end of the nineteenth century, Paul Cézanne begins to question something deceptively simple. Not what he is looking at, but how it holds together. How a form can feel both solid and shifting. How a table can tilt, how an apple can be both round and somehow not entirely stable in space.
“Still Life with Apples” (c.1893) By Paul Cézanne
These are not dramatic gestures. They are small, persistent doubts.
But they accumulate.
A philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, would later write about this in an essay often referred to as Cézanne’s Doubt. What he recognized was not a failure of representation, but a deeper honesty within it. A willingness to admit that seeing is not as straightforward as we might like to believe. That perception is not fixed, but continuous, without clear boundaries, without clean separations.
The world, as he describes it, is a kind of mass without gaps.
We know things are separate. We understand space intellectually. But visually, experientially, everything touches. Everything flows into everything else.
Cézanne does not resolve this.
He stays inside it.
And in doing so, he opens a door that painting has been walking through ever since.
In Christine’s work, we begin to feel that door open. There is still a sense of structure, but it carries a question within it. A recognition that perception is not entirely stable, even when it appears to be.
There are artists working today who step further into that space, not to analyze it, but to live within it.
In Part 4, we will step more fully into the work of Kristen Letts Kovak, whose paintings emerge through a process of response and adjustment, a kind of ongoing conversation between material, gesture, and attention. Forms appear, dissolve, and reconfigure. Color moves between paintings, carrying with it traces of one moment into another.
“Landslide” by Kristen Letts Kovak
Nothing is entirely separate. Nothing is entirely final.
What Cézanne introduced as doubt becomes, here, a kind of openness.
Not uncertainty as something to overcome, but as something to trust.
And perhaps that is the quiet shift that connects all of these works.
Not a movement away from reality, but a deeper engagement with how it is actually experienced.
Unstable. Continuous. Always in the process of becoming.
Gallery Notes:
Ambiguous Boundaries - Opening Reception: Friday, April 3, 6-8 pm
Show runs - April 3 - May 30, 2026
First National Bank Exhibition Hall: 604 Beaver St., Second Floor, Sewickley PA Artist Talk: Thursday, May 28, 5-7 pm Call 412-741-5858 for access to the exhibition.
Resources:
Mark Rengers Gallery 549 Beaver Street, Sewickley, PA 15143 412-741-5858
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne’s Doubt
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception
Previous Substack essay on Paul Cézanne (Mark Rengers Gallery Substack)