Beyond the Physical Edge

Diamond Zhou
May 9
6 min read

welcome to our

SATURDAY EVENING POST

May 9th, 2026

By Diamond Zhou

Written with time, thought, and a human pulse.

When a dancer’s arm reaches and extends outward, the movement does not stop at the hand; it continues through the fingertip, through the direction of the eyes, through the tension of the torso, projects outwards through the space, and through the audience’s own awareness as we follow the line beyond the body into something that cannot be fathomed. This is one of the mysteries of dance, that the most physical of arts, made from muscle, bone, tendon, discipline, balance, exhaustion, repetition, and timing, can also feel the least containable, as though the body, precisely by submitting to the limits of training and form, becomes capable of reaching past itself.

A large painting with vertical, gradient stripes in shades of blue and beige creates an optical illusion. Plain white gallery wall background. — Daniel Mullen, INFRA XX, 2026, Acrylic on linen, 94.5 x 80.7 inches. Please inquire for availability. Photo by Kyle Juron, © Paul Kyle Gallery.

Daniel Mullen’s recent paintings in ECHOES, our current exhibition of his works ask for a related kind of attention, and this is perhaps why they came to mind so insistently while watching FOR GLASS, part of Ballet BC’s UNITY. They are still, quiet, and restrained, yet they are not passive paintings, because their effects shift according to where we stand, how long we engage, how light graces the surface, and how the exposed linen alters, interrupts, and reopens the painted field. In his recent interview with Les Nouveaux Riches, Mullen says that “the physical boundary of the work is not necessarily its perceptual boundary,” and this seems especially true of these paintings, where the canvas does not behave like a closed object but as the beginning of a brief encounter, one in which the formal edge of the work remains fixed while perception expands outward into the room, into the viewer’s body, into the changing relation between surface, light, distance, and time.

In these works, vertical bands of raw linen run through pale, translucent fields of blue, grey, yellow, green, and off-white, but they are not stripes in the decorative sense, nor are they merely spaces left unpainted. They are the painting’s own ground left visible, the linen allowed to remain present rather than being buried beneath colour, and because of that they carry a strange double role: they interrupt the image while also holding it together, creating distance without closing the painting down, giving the eye something to pass through, pause against, and return to. The linen is not neutral; it has texture, warmth, resistance, and a quiet bodily presence, and when Mullen builds colour in thin layers around it, the painted portions begin to feel like veils of atmosphere held in relation to a material body.

For Mullen, the work is not fully contained by its physical edge, nor is it exhausted by reproduction. A photograph can show the composition, the restraint of the palette, the exposed linen, and the balance created by the symmetry, but it cannot fully show how the paintings “feel”, how they change when you step away, how colour seems to hover inside the weave of the linen, or how the beautiful raw linen holds the light that seems to emanate from within. These are works that ask to be seen in the gallery, where the viewer’s body becomes an integral part of the encounter through the simple act of approaching, stepping back, allowing the eye to adjust in the dim lighting, and noticing that the painting has changed because the relationship one has with the painting has changed.

Vertical stripes, alternating in light gray and beige, create a calm and minimalistic pattern against a subtle blue background.

Vertical beige and blue gradient stripes create an optical illusion effect on a canvas. The mood is calm and abstract, no text present. — Daniel Mullen, INFRA XXIV, 2026, Acrylic on linen, 94.49 x 80.71 inches. Photo by Kyle Juron, © Paul Kyle Gallery. Please inquire for availability.

While watching FOR GLASS, I was very moved during the passages in which the dancers moved in unison, it made me think about this expansion of an edge through the body. Unison can look, from a distance, like sameness, but its force comes from the opposite condition, because these are different bodies, with different histories, strengths, injuries, habits, fears, and ways of moving, held together for a moment with such exactness that the stage seems to become a single living being. The individual body does not disappear into the group; it becomes precise enough to enter a larger relation. Hearing from our friend, violinist John Marcus, who performed on stage with the dancers as part of the Microcosmos Quartet, the only musical accompaniment for FOR GLASS, coloured the way I watched the performance, especially when he spoke about the dancers’ generosity in rehearsal, their willingness to work closely with the musicians, and his own feeling of gratitude and humility before them. It brought forward what the audience often receives without fully considering: the labour and openness required to make something difficult appear as grace.

A dancer cannot revise a gesture once it has been enacted, just as a musician cannot retrieve a note after it has sounded. The audience can so easily drift, judge, misunderstand, or even fall asleep, but the performer remains inside the moment, carrying the full risk of the work while it is happening. Every movement contains years of repetition, correction, injury, repair, discipline, ambition, and return, yet the performer must release all of that labour into a present that disappears as quickly as it arrives. Dance spends the body into time, while painting, at least in one sense, waits for us. A painting preserves the pressure of a brushstroke, the restraint of a decision, the trace of looking and making, the presence of a body that is no longer present in the same way; dance offers the body itself and then leaves us with memory and the intense feeling that something has passed through us. There is something in live performance that feels almost spiritual, not because it leaves the body behind, but because the body is asked to carry more than itself for a brief and unrepeatable moment.

Two abstract paintings with vertical stripes in a gallery. A white pillar divides the images. Reflections on the polished concrete floor.

Abstract art with beige and gray vertical stripes creating an optical illusion effect, giving depth. Displayed in a minimal gallery. — Daniel Mullen, INFRA XIX, 2026, Acrylic on linen, 94.5 x 80.7 inches. Photo by Kyle Juron, © Paul Kyle Gallery. Please inquire for availability.

This is also why the paintings and the performance both depend on the viewer’s body. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writing on embodied perception gives language to something art already teaches us: we do not encounter the world as detached minds looking at objects from a safe distance; we see through bodies that tire, desire, remember, balance, ache, hesitate, and move. A dancer makes this impossible to forget because the body is visibly the work’s condition and cost, but Mullen’s paintings ask for a quieter version of the same participation. They require the viewer’s body to become attentive, to notice, and to feel with the works.

In the second half of the performance, when the dancers moved in the absence of music, the body began to disclose another kind of sound. Breath, footfall, brush, clap, stomp, friction, the pressure of weight against the floor, the collective rhythm of bodies sharing space: these became the score. What was mesmerizing was not the absence of music, but the discovery of a sound that had been inside the human body, and the movement all along, a sound produced by effort, contact, and living presence.

Two people observe a striped artwork in a gallery. One points while engaging in discussion. Neutral tones and a tan bag are visible.

A person in a black top and yellow plaid skirt closely examines a large striped artwork in a gallery setting, casting a shadow. — Photos by Kyle Juron, © Paul Kyle Gallery.

Susanne Langer’s idea that art gives form to feeling comes to mind, because feeling is not merely private emotion waiting to be expressed; it has rhythm, structure, direction, pressure, and shape. Dance gives feeling the form of movement, music gives feeling the form of time, and painting gives feeling the form of light held in matter.

Mullen’s paintings are full of feeling in this sense, even though they are restrained and almost reticent. They do not announce emotion, nor do they attach it to narrative, figure, or drama, but they organize perception into a state of delicate tension. The exposed linen is not empty, the pale colour is not passive, and everything depends on relation: linen to paint, edge to plane, surface to depth, material to light, the viewer’s body to the painting’s slow unfolding. Their beauty is not a matter of immediate seduction, although they are certainly beautiful; it is a beauty that demands time, the way a dancer’s movement can continue beyond the body or a note can continue in the silence after it has decayed.

Two large abstract paintings with vertical stripes hang in a gallery with white walls and a polished concrete floor. Soft lighting focuses on art.

As I walked today, looking through the fence on the Burrard Bridge at the spread of water, mountain, sky, and city, I thought unexpectedly of Mullen’s exposed linen bands. Not because the paintings depict landscape, and not because the fence explains the stripes, but because both experiences involve looking through a limit. The fence interrupts the view, but it also makes the view more acute; it gives the eye a rhythm and reminds the body that it is protected, separated, and held slightly apart from what overwhelms it. Mullen’s linen does something similar, it gives it distance, rhythm, and longing.

As Daniel Mullen: Echoes enters its final week, this is the invitation the paintings quietly extend.