In What was left behind, Emerson Pullman presents new paintings that orbit the unstable ground between memory and presence. This body of work is a reflection on transformation, on what is lost, what remains, and what continues to evolve. Pullman’s painting process itself mirrors this; layers of paint build and erode, decisions are made and undone, surfaces shift in and out of focus. Some marks stay, others disappear, each choice leaving its imprint on the canvas. In these paintings the idea of the self is in motion, caught between presence and absence, form and dissolution. Faces emerge and recede, bodies take shape only to blur at the edges, as if memory and reality are negotiating space on the canvas.

Drawing on the domestic intimacy of Vuillard and the dissolving light of Bonnard, Pullman plays with the structures of interior and exterior – latticework, chairs, chandeliers and framed artworks – that tether his figures to time and place. Yet these spaces never quite settle. Like memory, they flicker. A subject may sit posed, but we are not offered the comfort of permanence. Instead, we are invited to linger in what remains: the gestures, colours and atmosphere. To look back is not to dwell, but to understand how we carry the past within us; not as something fixed, but as something that moves forward with us.