In this work, Asher Liftin takes an unremarkable household glass tumbler and reconstitutes it through his signature process of pictorial translation. His practice investigates the two parallel strands of image creation and image perception, built upon research into cognitive science as well as the history of painting. Liftin’s unique process begins with a canvas prepared with a medium-grey ground onto which he projects a digital photograph which he transcribes in shades of white and greys. Over the monochrome foundation, he builds a minutely planned grid of individual dots in layers of coloured ink, mixed according to the CMYK subtractive colour system used in commercial printing. This method blends digital technologies and colour theory, drawing upon influences from the early Pointillists and later 20th-century artists such as Chuck Close.

Here, the result is a glass that seems to flicker between presence and dissolution. Up close, the vessel disintegrates into a shimmering static of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black dots — the vocabulary of digital printing, not of conventional colour mixing. When viewed at a distance however, Liftin’s painting plays to the brain’s powers of visual synthesis, and the tapered form of the glass solidifies, even conveying the distortion of the light as it passes through. The oscillation between dissolution and coherence is the tension at the heart of each picture that Liftin creates.

In depicting a glass, Liftin selects a subject whose properties of transparency and reflectivity are suited to interrogating vision itself. This motif extends a lineage that runs from 17th-century vanitas and banquet paintings through Chardin, Manet, and Morandi, all of whom used glassware to meditate on transience, pleasure and the limits of representation. Yet, Liftin’s specific choice of a mass-produced Duralex glass raises new questions about reproduction and individuality; the drips and smears on the canvas make plain the artist’s hand, dismantling CMYK associations of commercial printing and the ready-made nature of the glass subject.