Feelings seep into the ordinary. In Sentimental Veneers, Crystal Tranquilino examines loss not as a catastrophe but as a procedure. Each object carries the imprint of a former presence in which its emotional meaning becomes increasingly pronounced as its physical utility fades. What is left is an enduring insistence: a trace that stays long enough to become truth.

Here, the works do not mourn ruin but rather, bears it as what it means to carry time without choice, without question. In her previous works, Tranquilino traced the human figure: its gestures, its weight, and its vulnerability. Now, she shifted the focus to those that once accompanied those gesticulations and those that endured it. In doing so, she distills emotion into material. Quiet, concealed, but overflowing.

In Futile Devices, a chandelier lies collapsed – a potent symbol of grandeur and brightness that is now extinguished but persists beyond its function. It is a crown of light that even after it fades, still remains luminous in its surrender. Light Years still cradles the absence of a body. What it once held through movement, now expresses its disappearance through its tranquility. The diptych Either/Or was deliberately inverted, with Or being directly placed above Either. It was a conscious choice Tranquilino decided to do to initiate an internal dialogue between our knowledge of the world and our actual place in it - on how understanding always arrive after the fact and yet defines how we live.

The artist’s distinctive fluid traces are ever-present in these works but this time ambiguous in their substance and preconceived intention. Whereas in the past, Tranquilino used it to evoke the core emotional expression within her figures, now it behaves less like description and more like leakage. As though the feeling itself had become fluid that it started seeping through the seams of matter. Blue, here, is not a symbol but the event itself: a ritual of persistence that does not ask for permission.

Thus, this collection of work marks Tranquilino’s quiet but decisive shift from painting the body to painting what survives it. To call it Sentimental Veneers is to admit a complication. While sentiment suggests feelings, veneer suggests disguise. Still, as the body departs in the scene, the world it shaped continues to speak. Its limited palette mirrors the refusal to dramatize loss and underscores the conviction that what survives requires no embellishment.

In their stillness, these works do not console. They’re active records - and records are never neutral.