Rory Berthiaume’s Haze presents genre-bending works that drift between colorful poetry and energized figuration. Starting with seemingly simple ideas, such as lovers holding hands, Berthiaume subjects them to a transformative journey. Through repetitive erasure and re-articulation, he breathes life into these static images, introducing inviting complexities that defy the confines of certainty. Within the frames, emergence and dissipation dance as one, with Berthiaume moving the paint into impending forms whose reflections and refractions straddle the physical and vaporous. His pieces emit a potent eroticism that seems simultaneously cosmic and base, energies that expand, contract, and beam across the canvas, seeming to surge through the circuitry of organic connectivity. Pornographic images cut through the show’s more elusive compositions, suggesting a dynamic scale that examines interpersonal connection from different vantage points, sometimes floating within the sensorial sites of friction and desire or peeping into voyeuristic vignettes of connective moments. Building tension between the explicit and ethereal, active and suggestive, divine and organic, Berthiaume’sHaze urges us to venture into the realm of ambiguity and meditate on the beauty within the transience of ecstatic (consider removing) creation.