Mrs. is pleased to present The heart, a solo exhibition of new works by Robert Zehnder. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Who will hold the heart, and fix it so that it may stand still for a little while and catch for a moment the splendor of eternity which stands still forever, and compare this with temporal moments that never stand still, and see that it is incomparable…

(St. Augustine. Confessions, book XI, II)

The word efflorescence comes from the Latin root ‘effloresce’ loosely translating as ‘to flower’. In general terms, it’s defined as a blossoming or flourishing, a stage of culmination. A quick search online brings up images of a chemical reaction of the same name, which occurs when moisture pushes through the surface of porous materials like concrete or brick. In cities with prehistoric rivers—bodies of water that run invisibly beneath the surface of the earth and the streets built on top of them—the event is common. Chronic moisture rises through the foundation of buildings. As the water evaporates, crystalline mineral deposits are left behind in crusty, intricate webs.

In writing, love is often characterized through the use of apostrophe, a device that offers shape for the lover’s impulse to speak to, or for, the all-consuming other. A “discourse of absence” in which You are missing, so I pine, but You are also here, because I will it. Psychoanalysis likes to begin with childhood (whether returning to this stage is destructive is beside the point). Childhood is when one is first met with the possibility that You could leave, when one realizes the body is confined by finite edges. Even if just for a few seconds, this first experience of an unknown present means anticipating the worst until proven wrong. The immediate relief is followed by a fast-setting worry that it could happen again. That particular edge, we’re told, is love. Like any other processional, these behaviors are committed to memory, repeated for You after You after You. You who is faceless, an aura resting on the couch, overseeing the most mundane actions of my everyday. A lifetime can be spent trying to figure out how to fight this impulse; to play solitaire and not personify the algorithm shuffling the deck at each turn. To not only believe wholeheartedly in solitude, but relish in it; give it a name.

Saint Augustine ruminates on love towards the end of his Confessions and wraps it into an experience of time. He finds the same edge. There is an untethered moment that sits between longing for the past and hoping for the future, between an anticipation of possession and immediate reminiscence after disappearance. In this divine present is a calm, unreachable eternity where it is always today—and I am satisfied. Augustine’s heart is the undoing of love’s possible eternities. It chases. It swells with life as it is fleetingly pressed between then and yet, an utterly devastating moment of true aliveness. I want to live right there, in that crushing space, Augustine confesses.

Thought exercises on love have the heart danced out on a platter as a gift. What you do not have, given to someone who doesn’t want it. The shape of absence is drawn out by what is left behind. The other, and its control of the heart, stands in for a listless, distracted desire. To catch the temporal now would be to face a wretched, beautiful timelessness. The present tense hums in vibration, caught within two panes of glass, a vitality made in the spitting image of death. Time, like love, is better measured by what remains in empty spaces. While I am static, You are constantly in motion, ever-present, and by this I mean ever-missing. The contours of this negative space metabolize and become myth. Children play to cope with this type of solitude and learn to self-soothe by rolling a ball and watching it bounce against something, before it rolls back toward them. The painter presses a finger into a desert horizon, memorizing its glint.

Residue helps us decide whether to cherish something as serenity or mourn it as tragedy. In a moment of balance, I am pummeled by an old text message about being late to dinner, the traffic. The heart, burping blood in somersaults, flushes just beneath the skin’s surface. Your profile creates a ridge in the landscape. I see a void in its outline, or stars.

(Text by Harris Bauer)