For a number of years now, I have been thinking about recognition and misrecognition within painting. Sometimes this is a question of opacity and sometimes of repetition. I find myself returning to certain images to reprise them, at first hoping to understand their familiarity before having to contend with their strangeness.

Derived from the Ancient Greek tropos, meaning “way” or “turn,” a linguistic trope denotes a figure of speech. These devices, such as metaphors or synecdoches, permit certain things to stand in for others. A trope is both something recognisable and something that produces a change in direction: a recurring motif or common plot device that moves a story along, or a turn of phrase that redirects language.

Thinking about these shifts in direction, I was reminded of a 2023 visit to Arezzo to see Piero della Francesca’s The Legend of the True Cross fresco cycle, painted between 1452 and 1466. I was researching annunciation pictures at the time, having been fixated on the recurring depiction of the Virgin Mary holding a book. In the Arezzo Annunciation, Mary’s index finger rests between the book’s pages, holding her place in the story as the angel interrupts her to deliver the news. What struck me upon seeing the fresco cycle, however, was how Piero does not adhere to chronology but instead organises the narrative through a logic of mirroring. Everything shifted depending on the direction in which I looked. The frescoes seemed less concerned with delivering meaning than with these points of inflection.

The works in Tropes centre on different kinds of turning, shifting, and circling. There are lines which direct the gaze (without necessarily leading anywhere) and forms that appear recognisable before slipping back into pure surface. The strangeness of the image, its persistent otherness, is what I continually return to.

Shanti Shea An
Tropes
26 May – 20 June 2026