Lior Modan’s work invites touch—but not quite. On the somber, richly textured surfaces of velvet, patterns emerge, outlining everyday objects and settings: a watch, Dinner Gallery’s glass door leading to the courtyard, a table under an archway, and various indecipherable but seemingly familiar architectural forms. They are punctuated with scraps of domesticity and quotidian life: lace strips, tree branches, and old-timey tablecloth designs. In the artist’s solo exhibition titled The Foundations, each monochromatic piece quietly outlines the theatricality of everyday life. Oscillating across the terrains of sculpture, frottage, performance, and assemblage, Modan’s work gently unpacks the categorical pretense behind techniques of making.
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The façade of Modan’s work has an ephemeral quality, exuding a lustrous sheen: lines are formed not from pigment but as a result of layered, protruding structures underneath the taut velvet. The alignment of fiber piles and their varying depths dictate what the eye perceives. An alchemy of light is at play. It is as if with a sweep of a finger, the individual fibers can reverse their directions and yield a different imagery altogether. Tactile yet untouchable, Modan’s work and its unstable materiality highlight the fundamental arbitrariness and falsity of visual perception. And it is precisely because of the instability of the material itself that Modan successfully captures transient, atmospheric motifs such as rain and smoke.
According to a source, the artist “is a bit secretive about his process and wants to keep it a mystery.” I became curious about what’s invisible—the foundations of each piece, the hidden structures that made formal representation possible in this recondite practice. Based on one behind-the-scenes photo on Modan’s Instagram, it seems as though he would stack foam, wood, and other bits of utilitarian materials to create an architectural layout, which is then vacuum-sealed under velvet. This yields an aesthetic of suffocation and silence—I am almost reminded of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”—in which each sculptural configuration announces its existence in a dark, impenetrable space, gasping for air.
In a 2024 interview, Modan describes the mutability of what’s portrayed in his work: “It could be a fingernail, it could be a microscope, it could be a toilet bowl all in one. The images themselves are unstable, they keep changing.” Indeed, likeness and meaning in Modan’s work are just as layered as his process. Witness (2020), for instance, seems to portray a hand of cards, a frame, a fan, and a window all at the same time. The custom-made rubber frame is modeled after a belt, which then imbues the piece with an anthropomorphic sensibility. In L’été (2025) and L’hiver (2025), the titles allude to seasons and time-keeping. Against hazy, sandy backgrounds, these timepieces seem to recede into realms of remembrance and melancholy. Yet the playful use of twigs as watch hands may also suggest a sense of rediscovery and immediacy.
The press release mentions that the artist frequently considers theater in his work, referring to some imaginary scenes as “undone plays”—contextless set designs without human actors, activated by phantoms of imagination only. However, I’d like to think that these objects themselves are actors in Modan’s elaborate tableaux vivants. They exist as silhouettes and shadows only. They depart from realism in the most resolute and poetic manner, flirting with the total collapse of artistic genres. They are plays without a plot, paintings without lines, sculptures never unveiled.
In all its obscurity, The Foundations is about the hidden-in-plain-sight symbiosis of presence and absence, whereby visible facades haunt the viewer with what’s concealed. It’s like trying to see an oil painting from the backside of the canvas, or looking through a peephole from the outside in. Tender, motionless, and enigmatic, these velvet pieces catch me in a moment when fleeting truth is just beyond reach.
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Lior Modan: The Foundations is on view at Dinner Gallery through April 26, 2025.
About the writer: Xuezhu Jenny Wang is an art writer and editor with a background in postwar and contemporary art, design, and architecture. She is the editor-in-chief of IMPULSE Magazine and holds a B.A. from Columbia University. She is based in New York City.