Wayne Gonzales depicts scenes of contemporary America, cropped and reworked in acrylic paint, borrowed from the archives of American history and popular culture. Working from photographs, he engages with ideas of image making and the relationship between photography and communal memory.

Here, two figures are painted at the edge of a swimming pool. On the left, a man stoops over a sunlounger, while a woman sits looking into the distance. A car and a bicycle pass them in the background. The image emerges from Gonzales’ characteristic interlocking, criss-crossed lines, layered in differing densities. The ordinary, anonymous scene is made strange by the artist’s rigorous crosshatching, organised into alternating lines of intensity, as if the viewer is peering through a window blind, or trying to make out a fuzzy image on a staticky screen.

The short lines of colour in four orientations – vertical, horizontal, and diagonals at forty-five degrees – allow the artist to delicately render striking light and shade. The technique also serves as a barrier to the image. Dependent on the viewer’s proximity, the work comes in and out of focus, as if looking through the lens of an analogue camera. From afar, the viewer is granted a strong sense of the scene as a whole; when looked at up close, however, the image dissolves into an assemblage of brushstrokes, a pattern of line and monochrome colour. In this way, Gonzales’ painting presents a vision of contemporary America, but also offers a way of seeing: the viewer can step backwards to find a coherent view or move in closer to discover an abstraction.