Affecting and unexpected, molten and mellifluous, new works by Arceneaux revisit his ongoing Skinning the Mirror series, in which he uses the chemical viscera of manufactured mirrors as the foundational medium for paintings. But Arceneaux is not—or not only—painting per se; he is triggering a volatile material and spiritual event, a process-based alchemy operating simultaneously as a vaguely hazardous science experiment and an emotive vehicle for a protozoan, tumultuous soul.

        Through a thick, tactile orchestration of metallic chemical residues, the work transcends the limits of not only the process-painting idiom to which he often refers, but to the idea of controllable abstraction entirely. Conceptually, the work explores a metaphysical continuum between life, death, and epigenetic memory. Physically, the technique offers a material avatar of the elusive psyche. By stripping the silver nitrate backing from sourced glass mirrors and transferring this entropic, metallic skin onto canvas using acrylic, he encourages and memorializes a literal collapse of reflection, of image, of likeness, and control. At the same time, the infusion of luminous, liminal colors evoke phenomenologies of sunsets in a meadow, or smelting, or archeological fragments.

        For the most part intimate in scale, the monumental work Half-Light (see installation view) opens a new planetary dimension of landscape, the northern lights, or even interstellar moonrise; the extreme pinkness of its moment heading in a baroque direction that wrestles the conversation away from science and back to art history. Chunks of frayed gold-tinged silver glint against a predominantly fleshy palette of bubblegum, muscle, sunsets, bloodwork, and bruised roses. They evoke interstellar clouds and imploding stars while simultaneously mimicking the cellular division of a slide sample, as the dangerous mechanics of science experiments merge with a heady, ancestral consciousness. In this case the term “process” is shown to have two meanings—the term of art, and the act of figuring out how to exist.

Shana Nys Dambrot is an art critic, curator, and author based in downtown LA. Formerly the L.A. Weekly arts editor, she is a contributor to the LA Times, Alta Journal, PBS/SoCal, and other culture publications nationally.