Mikael Lo Presti

An unassuming painterly confidence permeates Stockholm-based artist Mikael Lo Presti’s show “Day After Day.” Dozens of hand-size still lifes—oranges and kitchen knives depicted against dusty-pink backdrops—repeat in rows throughout the gallery. In some pictures, the oranges are cut into neatly arranged slices; in others, the flesh of the fruit has been worked into blocky angles, the rind carefully peeled into expressive spirals. Contrast is used sparingly but to great effect. A blue sheen peeks through one of the pink-hued backdrops, while elsewhere the contour of the fruit’s exposed flesh radiates green. Cézanne’s sensuous apples seem an obvious reference here, a simple motif obsessively repeated in order to access the endless aesthetic potential inherent to the medium of painting.

Yet it would be reductive to cast Lo Presti as a formalist. Several paintings in large vertical formats feature scenes from everyday life that imply personal narrative and lived experience. Message, 2022, shows a young, casually dressed man seated streetside on a chair. His legs are crossed, and his attention is fixed to his phone. The lower third of this painting features a close-up rendition of the phone in the man’s hand. Two envelopes with heart-shaped seals float below, both rendered graphically like curious emoji. Here, Lo Presti deftly captures the affective flows of everyday life—a tingling shift in mood, a small tension in anticipation of a response from a love interest—in an arresting, decidedly contemporary image. It is a scene imbued with the slow burn of a lazy summer day but also brimming with emotional intimacy.