Scene XIII: Microcosm

Matt Carey-Williams, Sandy Lane, September 2025

“Man is the microcosm: I am my world.”
(Ludwig Wittgenstein, from a private journal entry written on 12 October 1916)

I: SIZE

The disciplines and abstractions of painting and physics may not seem to share much in common as tributaries of practice or thought, but one facet of their distinction does, indeed, nurture a telling synergy between the two: things get weird and wonderful when things get really small. The quantum experience is one where usual and known shift into a different frequency, offering a somewhat cabalistic pulchritude that vibrates with the elan of curiosity yet confounds with the abstruseness of the conundrum or enigma. Rather than unravelling the entanglements (and tenses) of form, matter, time and meaning, quantum physics does the very opposite, not inveighing against or even deconstructing the guarantee and preservation of knowledge, but rather reconstituting and recalibrating a new way of digesting that which illuminates and enlightens our essence. What was once known becomes unknown; what we supposed now deposed; what we never expected inexorably arrives with both flourish and furore.

Being – as animated and variegated a physical and psychological thrust as it can be – remains in a state of fixity. Experience loses that sense of permanence or totality in the quantum universe and instead becomes a coalescence of echoes: of what was, could or should have been now recoloured as an inchoate nebula of possibility and becoming. That mellifluous, amoebic elasticity of form and its concomitant matrix of renewal and reregistration now reborn in the quantum plane chimes neatly with the ‘scape of painting – especially abstract painting – when appreciated in smaller scales. Under the microscope of intense scrutiny, such smaller paintings offer another world in miniature, but one that ironically throbs with a more complex (ir)reality. Acts and arcs of mark, gesture, colour, pressure – the building blocks of surface – now dance to a different choreography; one more intimate, perhaps even more intense, in both expression and execution.

By zooming in to a smaller picture plane with (usually) the same tools and same methodology employed for larger surfaces, the physicality of the act of painting changes and, with it, a new morphology of abstraction is issued. A condensation occurs, but not one associated with the brevity of the designed vignette or any conscious strategy of abbreviation. Marks shrink but swell no less; gesture wriggles yet stomps and bounds with unabashed momentum. That which presents itself as tender or intimate can feel expansive, searching and explosive, with the ebullience of brushwork and chroma whispered as breathy passion but which is still vigorously articulated in dialects of fertile assonance and fiery dissonance.

So it is that this thirteenth Scene ponders the work of three young painters – Isabella Amram, Gena Milanesi and Daniel Roibal - all recently graduated from The Royal College of Art in London who turn the rage of hyperbole into the aching sophistication of litotes whilst still maintaining the power and dynamo of the monumental. These smaller paintings – some measuring less than a square foot – convey a generosity of scale and fluidity with the calibration and proportion ordinarily reserved for the reverence of icons, jewels or secrets. The result is a presentation that collectively evinces the ornamental opulence of gesture and the complexity and grandeur of composition (all of which ordinarily nurture larger, more commodious formats) yet which are forged on smaller scales, forcing the viewer to simultaneously feel both demonstration and delectation when in front of these paintings, urging harder, longer looking as if translating a hieroglyph rather than reading text.

Daniel Roibal, Sol alto, 2025, Oil on linen, 65 x 55 cm (25 5/8 x 21 5/8 in)

II: QUARK

Pigments act like enzymes in Daniel Roibal’s fluid, breezy compositions, investing a fizz and gentle propulsion to both brush mark and colour that serves to segregate the artist’s soft geometry of forms from one another whilst simultaneously encouraging a sunny efflorescence of ground to seep into those very forms. In Sol alto (2025) coloured cells sit side by side without forming any symbiotic relationship or unifying Roibal's composition; instead, each dance to a different rhythm, some floating, others stuttering; some resting as others swell and surge. Small, supple blocks of royal blue sit in contradistinction to plump, rosy ellipses; the former moving at some pace like curious dolphins, the latter bobbing underneath Roibal’s surface like languid jellyfish. Yet their apparent contest – formally and chromatically – for compositional or protagonistic privilege is tempered by their shared inevitable synthesis with the painting’s ground: a sunny, aureate yellow that seems to percolate slowly into each of Roibal’s marks, causing pinks to blush and blues to shine with envy. The ‘scape before us is one inspired by the heat and shimmer of the high sun; where moment drifts into mirage and time and space seem both suspended yet electrified. One senses the vastness of Roibal’s terrain (be that earth, sky or ocean), here brought to life by a constellation of agitated marks as well as streaky, chem-trail lines that bob and weave across a palpating ground. Yet Sol alto measures just over two feet in height: modest in scale but anything but diffident in execution and projection.

Daniel Roibal, Bajo el toldo naranja, 2025, Oil on linen, 130 x 100 cm (51 1/8 x 39 3/8 in)

In many ways Roibal’s mark-making, and his focus on colour relationships, speaks to the fundamental building block of quantum physics – the quark. These are the individual bricks of matter; the indivisible ingredients that make up the very quintessence of our experience. Quarks are weird, functioning in a space that makes up the very space of their function. They seem to communicate but don’t necessarily coagulate with each other. They exist in splendid isolation yet serve to charge particles into connection with a force known as ‘colour charge’. Such formal independence of shape, albeit one that still emits a magnetic energy, is powerfully displayed in Bajo el toldo naranja (2025). Miniscule shards of sage and apple green populate the majority of the painting’s surface, both avoiding yet complementing larger forms such as the comet of molten orange or the ghostly outline of an invisible asteroid that dominates the space. These function like quarks – energising yet enervating – offering a snapshot of a primordial plane that is neither time nor space, but which flicks the switch from silence to sound, from stasis to mobilisation. Whilst larger in scale, this painting still feels mythic and colossal, with each splinter of green carefully modelled to project at least the emergence of a plasticity that bounces off Roibal’s diaphanous ground of icy greys and lapis blues as it, in turn, seeks to absorb them into its shimmer.

Daniel Roibal, Viento de siesta, 2025, Oil on linen, 60 x 80 cm (23 5/8 x 31 1/2 in)

The delight one takes in Roibal’s paintings, again, chimes with the fascination one cannot but hold for the quark. Both express themselves as states of enigma – channelling verb and noun; conjugated yet cloistered as both agency and environment. Roibal’s Viento de siesta (2025) beautifully sums up both the precision and poetry of his mark making and, by extension, the mystery of the quantum experience. Another sunny ground humming in hues of yellow sets the stage for the simplest yet pregnant marks that effortlessly skip across it. Roibal possesses the lightest touch, evident in the crackle of his painterly finish and in his delicate orchestration of colour and gesture, cushioning themselves against one another as they still obviate any synergy. Quarks don’t make stories like atoms; they resist the harmony of narrative and, instead, rest in a state of pre-tessellation and pre-meaning, offering merely propensity or possibility. The same may be said of Roibal’s deliciously chameleonic compositions. They are ballets of marks, here performed on small, evanescent stages both celestial and earthly, subatomic and subconscious, by invisible ghosts, offering no sense or scale of dimensionality or physicality but, instead, serve to vibrate our intrinsic, essentialised pulse of being: what we see, what we feel, what we love.

III: QUERY

Isabella Amram’s painted universe pulls back from the molecular mystification of Roibal’s ‘quarky’ ‘scapes yet still unveil surfaces that pose more questions than offer answers. A problematic, born of process and purport, lingers throughout Amram’s paintings; one that tests the sanctity of composition by interrogating each separate mark or gesture that nourishes such arrangement. Inside each of her marks buzzes an oppositional, antithetical drive, pushing plane and space, boundary and grid into increasingly precarious states (as spatial coordinators intending to feed a visual logic) yet which always arrive at the most bounteous state of mellifluence, if not equilibrium. If Roibal garners a sense of harmony from a quantum insistence on elemental separation, then Amram achieves such accord because – again ironically – of the questions she asks not just of her process, but of the very matrix of painting itself. What is a mark? When does it exist? How does it function? What can it become? These are cardinal points that speak not just to the agency of her status as a painter but also as a person. The physical and psychological are thus inextricably linked to the painterly, so that any questions of surface attempt to translate the idioms of object, subject and, most significantly, author.

Isabella Amram, Surface Remembers, 2025, Oil, acrylic and floor paint on linen, 70 x 60 cm (27 1/2 x 23 5/8 in)

Surface Remembers (2025) is a small painting that punches above its weight. A maelstrom of burgundy, purple and caramel tones swish across Amram’s canvas, from left to right, shooting upwards and downwards. A vortex that is, however, curiously stabilised by a totemic thrust, occupying the central axis of the composition, that cannot help but reveal itself in figurative terms, even as it is swallowed then regurgitated again by the seismic energy of Amram’s flux. Perhaps this totem is that which the surface recalls, ebbing and flowing as memory and meaning in a visceral dynamo of paint that both observes and obfuscates with equal gusto. The fact this painting is only 70 centimetres high is astounding; it betrays no sense of preciousness or even any desire for control but rather indulges the viewer – and itself – with the pleasures of feral abandon. Strokes jump and dive, smear and scrub, scratch and pool across Amram’s linen like fallen angels, evincing a stage and scale that feels Biblical and yet which remains limited.

Isabella Amram, Pulse, 2025, Oil, acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 150 x 120 cm (59 x 47 1/4 in)

That central totem seems to return in Amram’s larger painting, Pulse (2025), but now adumbrated as a passage of paint, both dense yet inchoate, that could be a slab of meat as much as it could be a phantasm. This painting’s title may allude to the physical heartbeat of the artist’s own existence, but it also speaks to a different cadence – that of the painting itself. The agitation of Surface Remembers has now evolved into the beauty and horror of pure chaos. A state, both emphatic and uncertain, that perhaps echoes the artist’s own experimentation as a painter. Interlocking passages of virile paint confront then absorb one another, affording a totality that is born from resistance. Pressure and stress – beloved frenemies of the painter – work together to choreograph the most indefatigable of surfaces. One that feels as eviscerated as it is synaptic, simultaneously claustrophobic and evacuated. Again, it is the tempo and zing of Amram’s mark-making that issues something of the trompe l’oeil here: its noted frenzy suggesting a mammoth hyperbole that exists only in index, by extension. What you get is clearly not (just) what you see, here.

Such trickery – and the questions that asks of agent, action and aftermath – is most potent when appreciating Amram’s Skeletal Pinky (2025): a painting small enough to fit in your handbag. Less than eight inches square, this is truly a huge painting executed on a tiny scale. Again, a passage of painterly turbulence dominates the central axis and is dynamically pushed out of the pictorial space. Each fleshy stroke of pink and garnet tones serves to transform this squabble of paint into, perhaps, a more corporeal contest. Or association. When we once again factor in the painting’s title to our appreciation of it, those strokes – etiolated and individualised when seen up close – take on the rather dark estrangement of the skeleton, offering tributaries of signification that slide in and out of the vernacular of the Vanitas. Flesh and bone – and their inevitable depletion – summoned in each little osseous finger of pink so that colour, once more, charges surface, confirming, expanding and confounding in one tiny swoop of Amram’s ever-querying brush.

Isabella Amram, Skeletal Pinky, 2025, Oil on canvas board, Framed: 29 x 29 cm (11 3/8 x 11 3/8 in) Unframed: 25 x 25 cm (9 7/8 x 9 7/8 in)

IV: QUIDDITY

Roibal’s haunting surfaces inveigh against the confines and conditions of palpability, existing in a poetic realm of quantum abstruseness that feels almost dreamlike. Whilst Amram’s paintings entangle both her and her viewer in what seems to be the very biology of painting – its heart, brain and guts - her surfaces likewise question the discipline’s ability to evince a measure of presence. This effort to determine a shape of sense – physically or artistically – is continued in the elemental paintings of Gena Milanesi. Hers being a voice that speaks in tongues both ancient and contemporary, worldly and magical, offering the viewer a glimpse not into the hereditary of substance per se, but into its continual transubstantiation and evolution. One that traces the outline of the ever-shifting traces of space, being and desire: grand gestures and all-encompassing subjects that are, again, condensed into somewhat humble passages of painting that seem to defy the architecture and language of proportion.

Gena Milanesi, Deep River, 2025, Oil, oil stick and charcoal on canvas, 80 x 60 cm (31 1/2 x 23 5/8 in)

Upon first inspection Deep River (2025) howls across the canvas in gusts of papal purples, ultramarines and the most delectable lavenders. Yet any expectation of agitation that comes with such energetic mark-making soon gives way to a softer acoustic, sounded by the artist’s achingly beautiful arrangement of silky arabesques of plane and colour, and massaged by Milanesi’s comforting line of coordination. Just as her smaller paintings mouth monumentality, so too do they slip between passion and pastoral, toying with the viewer’s assumptions as to the intent of gesture, as well as manipulating the various accents of any brushstroke. Milanesi’s is a world where what you see is not what you expect: soft soon hardens; tributary soon expands into delta; surface evaporates into negative space enlivened only by final flicks of a splashy brush, making for a chameleonic surface that arrests as much as it soothes. Deep River, of course, suggests the flow of water and, by extension, its noted depth can allude to its complexity and, perhaps, danger. That exposure is read not just physically but also psychologically with the river – and its draft – speaking to the artist herself. The long, luxurious strokes of lavender in the lower left of the painting even offer a figural silhouette: a nymphish Daphne or spied-upon Diana, perhaps? Both signifiers of beauty and strength but only realised in acts of resistance or revenge against men. This invites further connection for the viewer to the (potential) storied turmoil Milanesi whips up with her searching brush. However, more than any mythological or psychological thrust, it is Milanesi’s embrace of the quintessential that illuminates her work. Articulated not as any attempt to hold onto or make manifest the prehistorical, preconscious vim of actual earth, wind, fire or water but, rather, to grip their significance as winds of time and glyphs of lost innocence. Not unlike Ovid does. Not unlike Freud does.

Gena Milanesi, Away Message, 2025, Oil, oil stick and charcoal on canvas, 150 x 120 cm (59 x 47 1/4 in)

Amplified slightly, Away Message (2025) continues Milanesi’s journey into the quiddity of her surface and process, purloining quotations from Nature, art history, mythology and her own personal archive. Painterly communication here remains just as buoyant and effervescent as in Deep River but feels more layered and orchestrated. To find the artist’s message, the viewer must sift through several glazes ranging from bright, oleaginous blues through to diaphanous veils of phantasmagorical whites, all of which are enlivened by a series of peachy strokes that, in both chrome and consternation, speak to the human form. Again, the architecture of Milanesi’s gesture declares an abundance that transcends any material concerns with size. Hers are lavish marks, declarative yet curious, tense yet tender, that streak and surge across a canvas whose relative scale sits at odds with the Baroque opera of paint that contains it. Size does matter to Milanesi, but only because she employs matter (as force and intimation) to catechize the physical, aesthetic and conceptual boundaries proposed by the limits of size and the tenets of system.

Gena Milanesi, Strange Quiet, 2025, Oil, oil stick and charcoal on canvas, 100 x 80 cm (39 3/8 x 31 1/2 in)

Strange Quiet (2025) is a painting that constantly morphs between various moods and manners of matter, making and measure. Dry, broad scumbles of industrial greys offer a frangible ground, perfumed with an almost sullen air that is momentarily electrified by flashes of acid, citrus marks. Once more, Milanesi lets loose flocks of pellucid brush marks that glide in and around these painted passages only for more confrontation (and ultimate communion) to occur, this time between several moments of serous dripping, punishing yet vivifying surface as it streams down the painting, and a sooty line that, equally, arranges yet discombobulates the composition. Whilst the disturbance is gentle, it nonetheless triggers the artist’s surface in the most sophisticated manner, with the atonal melody of her composition empowered in contradistinction and by conflict. The zip of Milanesi’s movement gathers momentum only as it pushes against her rocky, elemental ground; colour feeds off shadow, draining its temperature; line – like drips – bleeds off plane in another vampiric act of deconstruction. The resulting silence is, indeed, both exquisite and unnerving: a murmur of raptured horror that echoes throughout the annals of our collective experience as both hope and fear and feels no less itchy or profound today than ever before.

V: MATTER

This essay began with a quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein. His distinction between ‘microcosm’ and ‘world’ is telling; the former functioning as ‘other’, the latter as ‘self’. That is to say that, for Wittgenstein, any understanding of self (as the transcendental subject) can only be achieved by probing personal experience which, in turn, is defined by acknowledging the limits of perception and communication. If “I” is both the boundary and foundation of subjective experience, then the ‘world’ becomes its space and state. It – “I” - becomes its (my) own self-contained matter. The ‘microcosm’, in turn, announces itself as anything but ‘micro’. Not in an indicative manner, emblematic of the manifold indices life endlessly generates, but as the alterity or foil against which experience is constantly measured. Micro becomes macro (as it always was, is and will be). So it is that the ‘microcosm’ extends to us the scales we use to calibrate, delineate and digest our own individual worlds. Just as Daniel Roibal, Isabella Amram and Gena Milanesi do with their ravishing paintings, offering both insight into their own personal worlds as well as providing the sighting for such contemplation. All three of these wonderfully exciting painters know that size matters but only because they know that matter can (and must) be (re)sized.

Matt Carey-Williams
Sandy Lane, Wiltshire
18-21 September 2025