The Mirror Age

“The Mirror Age” is Kevin Van Pelt at his most contemporary and most daring. A figure stands before the glass, phone raised, and the body itself becomes a field of invention — ribs of indigo and slate, a chest flushed with sudden crimson and orange, all of it blazing against a wall of molten yellow.

This is not a flattering likeness but an honest one: the painting dismantles its subject into pure color and gesture, the anatomy half-sculpted, half-dreamed. The phone, held at the solar plexus, becomes the one hard, literal object in a world of flux — a small dark window that both reveals and hides.

In a single image Kevin captures the strange ritual of our moment: the self, offered up to a screen, rendered here with the raw painterly force of an artist who sees it for what it is — vulnerable, electric and entirely human.