Continuing the ink of his Berlin and Los Angeles residencies, "Chronicle of the Human World" performs a return: from the "symbolic person" back to the person. Earlier he had used the massed portrait to write a whole generation's biography — but the massed portrait is itself a wrapping, conscripting living individuals into the sign of an era. Now he means to peel this layer away too.

He removes the setting and the metaphorical props, leaving only the features and a single gaze — "like the difference between a novel and a poem." What he means to salvage is not the model's body, nor any social message, but the feeling that plainly stirs when two pairs of eyes meet, and that courtesy and a tacit understanding quietly press down. It is a truth of the narrowest kind: it has no name and conveys no meaning, yet it truly happened between two consciousnesses. He even believes that two people gazing at each other for twenty minutes come nearer to understanding than twenty minutes of talk — for language is often the last, and thickest, wrapping of all.

And so these black-and-white faces fall quiet, almost to the point of transparency. When everything sayable has been taken away, only the gaze remains. Stand before the work and you cannot tell whether you are looking at a painting or the figure within it is looking back — the reversal of the gaze that first opened its eyes in the Strawberry series here sheds its social reference, leaving the barest fact of all: one person, truly, looking at another.