I’m standing in front of Pace Taylor’s painting That Laughing Outside. I’ve been to their show, Before the Doors Open, at Nationale, three times now, and I keep landing in this spot. It's of a person in bed with the bright red hand of another person reaching out to touch them. But someone next to me just asked their friend if the pillow is a swan. It's not a swan. It's a pillow. But I will concede that it's a little hard to find your bearings in the picture. It comes slow. You just need to give it a minute. 

Like all 10 soft pastel paintings in the show—the gallery calls these works on paper “paintings,” which is common—the scene collages together elements rendered in disorientingly varied levels of detail. The bedspread, headboard, and windowsills are surreally flat and symmetrical, with consistent, stone-like textures. The colors set an uncanny glow, too—especially in the figures’ fire-truck red bodies, which are drawn in hyper realistic detail, popping against dimensionless planes of flat black and the ghost white pillow. Still, the scene is familiar; we’ve all been the upset person in bed and we’ve all been the person trying to console a loved one who’s upset and in bed. Probably not with a swan around their neck, though.

If you give it that minute, the painting fills with the complicated emotions that animate Taylor’s work: reconciling the desire to be alone with the desire to be loved, accepting that both can be true.

Before the Doors Open is Taylor’s third solo show with the gallery in as many years, but it’s their first back in Portland after showing in Paris and Los Angeles last year, and a spring fellowship in London at the Royal Drawing School. The show sold out before it opened. Despite only starting their full-time practice in 2020, Taylor, who’s 31, has published illustrations in the New Yorker and on a reissue cover of The Picture of Dorian Gray. A collector list is rumored to resemble a phone book. This show mints them as a rising star, with a knack for characters who yearn for things they don’t have the tools to pursue—a universal, terrifyingly human experience.

Directly opposite the bedroom scene is the title piece of the show, Before the Doors Open. I can’t quite catch the figure’s gaze. They’re peering out from behind a curtain, looking confusedly at something in the distance, while another person seems distraught about that snuck peak. For a second, I try to decide if it’s a window or a stage they’re looking out from, but the anguish in their face seems more important. As the title suggests, there’s a frozen quality to their pose, like they’re bearing all the consequence of looking when they shouldn’t have.

This tone of stolen glimpses weaves the show together. It’s the same mythological “looking taboo” of dire consequences for daring to peek that trapped Eurydice in the underworld, morphed Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt, and turned everyone who checked out Medusa to stone.

Taylor identifies as neuroqueer—a broad term that, they’ve said, is useful in describing how, for them, being trans and autistic are deeply entwined. Taylor’s characters, whether behind a curtain or burrowed into a pillow, long to be heard out, to know and be known in every sense of the word. But there’s always an intangible wall preventing them from the acceptance and connection the rest of the world seems to possess with ease. The paintings are informed by a unique life experience, but the feeling that the world can’t make space for you is universal. 

Watercolor paintings, a new medium for Taylor, ask for empathy in a different way. Dozens of postcard-sized portraits line four walls of their own little gallery. I can’t decide if I’m haunted or enchanted by this stark room of tiny faces. Both, I think. The color schemes—which read like heat-sensitive images—are similar to the pastel works. But otherwise the series, ominously titled Interlude 01 to 40, is a dramatic new direction. The tiny paintings are quick and lively, clearly painted in one momentary go, before the dipped paper dries. There’s a playful, sketchbook quality to them. Two are said to be of Harry Dean Stanton and Nastassja Kinski from Paris Texas. Another, I’m pretty sure, is a study of one of the larger paintings, pillar of salt, named for the Shirley Jackson short story, in which midcentury New York City devolves into Sodom.

The painting is of a crumpled figure in profile who, suffice to say, has seen some shit. Their flat green dot of an eye looks in all directions and—aside from their giant, painstakingly rendered ear—the rest of them seems to be dissolving. The background is a vacant black. 

Here is a character watching society crumble in real time—traumatized by what its residents are too busy to notice. They didn't crystalize in an instant but rather slipped into the certainty of agoraphobia—not because they wanted to, but because they were profoundly alone in a crowd. In Jackson’s short story, the prose carefully leads you to empathizing. It teaches you how to see its protagonist in a concise 10 pages. Taylor’s 10 paintings ask for the same thing, a world that won’t leave you behind for stopping to look at it.

Ed Note: Matthew Trueherz has worked on editorial projects published by Nationale's bookshop.