Mitchell Kehe’s targeted irresolution

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The title of Mitchell Kehe’s solo show at 15 Orient – “Bonded by the Spirit of Doubt” – encapsulates the ambiguity and contradiction in which he traffics. Doubt is fundamentally divisive and isolating, a fraught source of any bond in the sense of affection or solidarity. Maybe he means “bonded” in the sense of “certified,” the way American whiskey is, uncertainty and doubt being such pervasive phenomena that no work of art can claim validity or integrity without somehow imparting them. In his beguiling paintings, this idea is manifested in a casual tension between artifice and its subversion, which is native to quite a bit of good art. It seems to service Kehe’s apparent conceit that his work is resistant to consensus interpretation and instead functions as a kind of subjective Rorschach test for each viewer. Alex Kwartler, Rebecca Morris, and Enzo Shalom harbor similar convictions, though Kehe takes a minimalist approach more akin to Robert Ryman’s in its default emphasis on facture as a tangible means of tracing the development of a painting strictly in real time and directing attention to process rather than narrative. Even so, the paintings do seem to distill themes that a fair number of viewers might well apprehend, and they are especially effective in simulating resonant existential vexations.

Untitled 1 seems to present two alternative images of a continent on a map, one verdant and the other enroute to benightedness. It works well enough as a straightforwardly foreboding civilizational statement; less obviously, it suggests the mutability of perceptions and attitudes from minute to minute and person to person. For Kehe, that’s kind of meta. Untitled 13, depicting an arc of ambiguous objects afloat in a dark field, could chart a perimeter for use in a cosmic wargame – or simply reflect the pastoral apprehension of a night sky. Several distinctly segmented canvases are more overtly ominous. Untitled 9 essays the encroachment of a vaguely organic gray blob – a biomorphic trope that also emerges in several of Kehe’s smaller paintings – on neatly abstracted incidents of enlightenment. To comparable effect, a florid, detonating red rectangle overlaps and overwhelms a gentle pink one in Untitled 4, while an amorphously invasive swath stalks what appears to be a manmade shelter in Untitled 11. The visual structure of Untitled 20 simply disintegrates from the top down. To be sure, brushstroke and overall painterliness downplay artistic rhetoric, but discernible composition also intimates that an artist consciously devised the paintings, which must therefore signify something – right?

Particularly in his titled installations Hard Edges and Irredeemable Missteps and First Layer of Revelation – jaunty agglomerations of found objects that change with the sunlight – Kehe suggests that life is predominantly a sequential, phenomenological matter. Yet people are also hardwired to fill vacuums with meaning. He seems sharply aware that we crave a teleological architecture that remains elusive – or at least, if we think we’ve found it, vulnerable. In this vein, possibly, is Untitled 2, in which inscrutable off-white cellular strands resembling DNA are surrounded by delicate, baselessly hopeful yellow orbs. Such discordant phenomena prompt agitation, retreat, and, not least, dread. Untitled 14 presents, against a mottled white background, a wan, cartoonish geometric figure who looks to be wielding a sword and a shield. The pale silhouette in Untitled 7 could be a cowboy or a flower. Whipsawed between engagement and avoidance, we can attack and defend like ideologues or opt out and make light of modernity’s tiresome stickiness like hipsters. We’ll do both, depending on the moment, until we don’t. With disarming cool, Kehe gives potent voice to human aspiration and confusion. That’s my take, anyway.

“Mitchell Kehe: Bonded by the Spirit of Doubt,” 15 Orient, 72 Walker Street, 3rd Floor, New York, NY. Through February 14, 2026.

About the author: Jonathan Stevenson is a New York-based policy analyst, editor, and writer, contributing to the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and Politico, among other publications, and a regular contributor to Two Coats of Paint.