Echo Chamber

Echo Chamber closes in. The canvas is filled almost entirely by a head tipped back and a pair of hands bringing a striped, glossy vessel to the mouth, the object banded in blue, yellow, red and white like hard candy or glazed ceramic. Around the central action, planes of magenta, emerald, orange and cobalt fold across one another, and a strip of gray sky opens at the upper right.

The horizontal format and the cropping give the painting its intensity. Nothing is held at a comfortable distance; the figure's throat, jaw and hands press against the picture edges, and the viewer is placed close enough to be implicated in the act rather than observing it.

As in the rest of Engel's work, the body and its surroundings are made of the same substance. Fabric turns to sky, an arm becomes a band of orange, and the striped vessel repeats in the lower left as though the gesture has already happened once. That repetition is where the title lands.

At thirty by forty inches this is the most intimate work in the group, and the smaller scale concentrates the color rather than diluting it. The painting reads as a single held moment, amplified until it starts to reverberate.