Utilizing Constructivist lines and spatial compositions as the only rule in a game of free-association for mundane human activity, Mernet Larsen animates these non-objective forms as a swimsuit-clad family of campers, who brandish bow, arrow, and marshmallow roasting stick as the moon looms obliquely.

The Brooklyn Rail’s Eleanor Ray writes, “Larsen’s paintings can have a game board feeling as well, with figures placed in strange locations according to mysterious perspectival rules. Her figures occupy the wilderness of abstract paintings, in compositions often drawn directly from El Lissitzky. When she turns his free-floating constructivist lines into figures, gravity serves as a succinct source of visual humor—a danger in 'Misstep' (2015), or an anchor in 'Frontier' and 'Campers' (both 2015), rooting the figures securely to a tilting surface. 'Frontier' and 'Campers' further articulate ideas that were already present in her near-monochrome paintings of the late 1980s and ’90s, when only the titles indicated that compositional lines could be read as figures moving up an escalator, hang gliding, or shooting an arrow. In the new paintings, a constellation of local details emerges, gently disrupting the rigid geometry—we notice hats, noses, knees, swimsuits, the surface of a piece of lumber and the hands carrying it.

These isolated moments are central to Larsen’s individuality, which comes from a kind of selective attention or interest. She appears very engaged with the details of ears but not at all with those of mouths or noses, which she tends to render systematically as a line and a triangle. The undersides of the chin and nose come into strange focus, treated as simple planes. The figures are rendered in just two or three tones, the color usually getting more saturated in the shadow, where jewel-like oranges, pinks, and turquoises seem to take on force by absorbing light. It’s funny to find this system persistently maintained even in 'Campers' and 'Frontier,' where the figures are barely wider than a pencil and the light hitting them becomes a very thin stripe.”