An erotics of the painterly surface plays out in Maya Weishof’s practice. Across intimate scenes and interiors, we see bodies naked, at rest, reclining; figures glancing or gazing; deep in conversation, sharing a cigarette. This erotics is not merely the condition of bodies exposed and in the nude. In Weishof’s works, it is a sensory plenitude—proliferating images, marked surfaces, visual stimuli—presenting a painterly surface that is as visceral as it is vicinal, intricately contiguous and intriguing, demanding a promiscuous attentiveness.

In O Atêlie (2026), an oil on canvas diptych work, we are in an artist atelier. A woman, her back to us, looks like she is finishing a painting. Beside this painting, taped onto the wall, are some sketches—perhaps studies, inspiration. Behind the woman, closer to us, is a book opened to a spread of painting references. Across her is a man. She is glancing at him from the other side of the diptych. He is naked, reclining towards the edge of the frame, part of his upper body cut off. He is inspecting a camera that hangs by a strap around his neck. In front of him: a lit cigarette. A wheeled cart is behind him with another set of painting implements.

It is a rich scene. Instead of a unifying vista that intuits the illusion of relative scales and distances, the composition is generally flat. Looking closely, one can distinguish the edges of the floor and wall. The flourish of adjoining ornament and detail—from the carpet to the wallpaper—renders this distinction a bit harder to discern. The flatness proliferates surfaces, paintings inside the painting. Within the composition are smaller vignettes: the unfinished paintings, the sketches and references taped onto the wall, a smaller painting that decorates the plant pot near the woman. In the unfinished painting, figures are rendered with the most luscious lines, bodies inching towards one another, anticipating or some already writhing in desire’s consummation. The other painting depicts a forested park rendered in Fauvist chromatic intensity, and instead of a flat canvas, it is painted on what seems like a wooden panel with hinge doors, practically a window. On the vase, two bodies in union. Some vignettes bring attention to this flatness even more. Instead of warping into the horizontal plane, the opened book and the table of painting implements sit undisturbed along the vertical axis of the painting.

Thinking about the distinction between hermeneutics and erotics, Susan Sontag describes traditional interpretation as excavation work: “[The old style of interpretation] erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs ‘behind’ the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one. . .To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings’.” Instead of this excavation, an erotics, for Sontag, prioritizes “the pure, untranslatable, sensuous immediacy of . . . its images,” “works of art whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be just what it is.”

Sontag’s diatribe against the excavation for meaning finds an interesting counterpoint in Weishof’s paintings. Because painterly surfaces proliferate across niches and vignettes, interpreting the work would require multiple excavations that would lead to labyrinthine allusions and interpretations. Since the composition is flat and these surfaces are seemingly simultaneously placed on one plane, unitary meaning might prove an impracticable achievement. Instead, Weishof’s paintings demand an iconographic program that is looser or slacker and more casual—a promiscuous iconography. Promiscuity here alludes to the way each painting, because of the sheer number of smaller images in each of them, cultivates an iconographic approach that stays on the surface, indiscriminate and meandering.

The superficial in Weishof’s repertoire does not demean or diminish painterly labor. Far from that: in staying on surfaces, proliferating them to plenitude, the work sharpens the sensibility of looking at and figuring out what the images are and are about. Faced with this proliferation, we are taught to become promiscuously attentive in our encounters with the works. Contra Sontag’s imagination of erotics’ unified and clean surface, rapid momentum, and direct address, Weishof’s “sensuous immediacy” asks us to stay and stray: here are bodies in the throes of passion, here is a lush forest, here is a woman glancing at a man whose attention is on something else, depriving us of his complete transformation as simultaneously the object and subject of desire.

Two other works extend this conversation. In Festa la fora (2026), we see a woman almost reclined, draping over an heirloom chaise longue. On the wall is what looks like a large flower that almost looms over her. It can be textile—embroidery or perhaps appliqué? Beside it is the titular festa. It seems like a painting, but in this composition can also be a window. The style of figuration between the foreground and the inset image is comparable: sinuous lines and supple bodies. Chromatically they are dialogic: the rusty reds and the burnt siennas vis-à-vis the pastel blues and indigos. This tendency toward ambiguous surfaces is carried through in the work Me vendo no escuro (2026). In the dark, in what looks like a bedroom, a woman is checking herself on the mirror. Her back is towards us. The room is rendered in a vivid red: the woman’s skin and hair are red, the ornately decorated base of the mirror is red, the wall and the carpet are red. Her reflection in the mirror, a tightly framed full-frontal image, is a cool blue. This vignette offers us an interesting idiom with which to understand the other vignettes in the work. Beside her is a suggestion of a bigger painting, of which more than half has been cut off from the frame. From the panel that is left in the work, a figure of a woman is enframed, much like the blue reflection in the mirror. On the far-left corner of the painting is another painting—perhaps lush tropic at dawn or a burning forest. In either case, a cat from the adjacent ledge has entered the painting: half of its body already inside the frame, its hind feet about to step in, its torso already twisted to orient her disappearance inside and into the frame’s edge. Each of these three vignettes offers a window: the reflection is the figure presented; it presents herself to herself and to us; the figure of the woman from the painting fragment offers a vaster vista, away from the intense vicinity that we sense in the painting’s world, i.e., the room’s interior; the cat entering the painting of the forest breaches this world. The flatness of the work suspends the finality of deciding whether this view is window pane or painting. Both Festa la fora and Me vendo no escuro lean into the proliferation of painterly surfaces to cultivate not only an embrace of different iconographies but also for these kinds of equivocations to flourish. The equivocal mandates a promiscuous reading.

The achievement of this promiscuous attentiveness can be best sensed in Quarto de máscaras (2026), where the plenitude of painterly surfaces also becomes the proliferation of architectonic articulations. The woman in the bed folds and contorts her body to fit in it. On the bright yellow carpet is a mask and beside it, seemingly perpendicular to the floor, is a small box that houses a couple more kinds of oni masks. Behind the box is an alcove shelving unit: on top of it is a dying shriveled plant, a muscular statue, a thriving bonsai. There is a wicker chair and what looks like a wall divider on the edge farthest from the woman. While these details render the painterly world haptic and inhabited, we see in the frame’s edges a couple of vignettes that frame the scene, another set of niches that this time is superficially situated. In one there is a cup of coffee, a fine-toothed comb, a fox about to pounce, a flower, a bug, an erupting volcano.

If erotics in Weishof’s practice thrives in the works’ flatness and in their prolific superficiality, it is in operations of contiguity that a promiscuous iconographic disposition is cultivated. Contiguity tempts us to read these images in relation to one another—without question. In some works, the contiguous is mediated by the materiality of the frame, as in how some images are cut off by the finality of the edges of the frame itself. In other works, this contiguity is rendered more contingent. The artist sews cutouts from paintings onto existing canvas. The result is a more analogical way of introducing other vignettes into the paintings, exceeding and supplementing the compositional frame. In Dayoff (2026), a group of women is absorbed in an engrossing conversation. Except for one androgynous figure flailing their hands, they sit on the carpet naked. Motifs appearing throughout this exhibition’s body of work recur in this image: a mask, a cigarette, a view of what looks like a burning forest. While the central composition is a lot simpler compared to the others in the set of works for the exhibition, smaller niches—stitched onto the main canvas—complicate this scene: an almost full ashtray; a pot of tea being poured into a matching cup; the curious assemblage of a spilled cup, a blade, a clock, and a flower head; piano keys against a red backdrop; a heterosexual pornographic film playing on a TV; a vase which, instead of having an image of bodies in ecstasy like the other vases, is now presenting a plane mid-air. Stitched onto the typical scene of women gathered in conversation, the vignettes are at once context and subtext as they are distraction or misleading speculation. In either case, it is impossible to be sure. What is assured, however, is that these are images that seem to relate to one another, images that have appeared in some other form in other paintings in the exhibition. Within this composition, the erotics of the painterly surface transforms the superficial into the scenographic, creating in this transformation a cosmology of surfaces and their temptations: worlds in continuous formation, bodies in perpetual proximity, vistas of a vaster world, portals to other lives, times, places—a world perpetually fascinating in its contiguous contingencies.