Eden was a trap. The Garden of Paradise was not so much paradise as equal parts sanctuary and minefield. While a sanctuary with a minefield does not make for eternal bliss, it does not make for eternal torment, either. Ever since Eve and Adam bit into that forbidden fruit, humankind has been blessed with the freedom of choice, the freedom to go back on one’s decisions, and the freedom to linger somewhere in the in-between.

Doublecross, Rae Klein’s fourth solo exhibition with Nicodim and her second at the gallery’s flagship Los Angeles location, is a visual palindrome of existential riddles imbued with a quiet, primal tension—shame from after the Fall perforated with moments of serene enlightenment. These are paintings from a freshly exploded consciousness, an ethereal, eyes-half-opened state somewhere on the spider’s thread between Heaven and Hell.

The recursive, dreamlike renderings of chandeliers, dogs, and women with faces obscured by distorted household items may read the same both forwards and backwards, but each scan pulls forth another treacherous, nay, intriguing landscape of unanswerable questions and choices to be made and reconsidered. In the larger-than-life scaled I am overcome, two near-identical chandeliers hang from nowhere in a vacuum. From afar, the chandeliers appear to be articulated with precision, but their branches blur, dissipate, and merge together on closer inspection. They are there and they are not, what was the question?

In Bodyguard and you are completely safe II, women styled as if they exist in some bygone, domesticated era squint and close their eyes seductively or in ecstasy, while candelabras (in the latter) and handcuffs (the former) warp and weft their ways in and out of the foreground. The viewer is cognizant of the artist’s decisions, but her subjects are suspended in an aspic of the unaware or just-don’t-care. These paintings are not dreams, but pathways of sentience double crossing one another again and again in an ever-expanding fabric of anti-narrative.

If oil on linen is a language, Klein’s figurative vocabulary is a Voynich manuscript from a foreign place either forgotten or disappeared. Magic lurks in the brief moments of seeming clarity, but even more so in the not-knowingness. Doublecross finds pleasure in the sweet caress of paradise slipping through one’s fingers and almost-but-not-quite catching it ad infinitum.

(Text by Ben Lee Ritchie Handler)

Rae Klein (b. 1995) lives and works in Michigan. She graduated from Eastern Michigan University in 2017 with a BFA in Painting. Her visual vocabulary isolates references to mankind’s attempts to assert its mastery over the feral world through fear, power, spirituality, or some combination of the three. Exhibitions include Doublecross, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2025, solo, forthcoming); Echoes of eden: a return to Bosch's garden, curated by Gaïa Jacquet-Matisse and Peter Brant Jr., Private residence, New York (2024); Niklas Asker, Rae Klein, Jorge Peris, Nicodim, New York (2024); The ballad of the children of the Czar, Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest (2024); Disembodied, curated by Ben Lee Ritchie Handler, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2024); Powerplay, Nicodim, New York (2023, solo); Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest: 10 years, Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest (2023); Last night I dreamt I was running, Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest (2023, solo); Disembodied, curated by Ben Lee Ritchie Handler, Nicodim, New York (2023); Low voice out loud, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2022, solo); The comfort in calamity, Jessica Silverman, San Francisco (2022, solo); Bodyland, curated by Lauren Taschen, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin (2022).