Lyles & King is pleased to present Latent Stack, a new suite of paintings by Chris Dorland and his fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.

The exhibition takes its title from the layered computational processes through which contemporary images are produced. In machine learning systems, visual data passes through successive operations that compress and transform information before an image ever appears. These hidden layers—known as latent representations—contain the structural conditions from which images emerge. Dorland’s paintings engage this upstream terrain, translating the logic of these operations into material form through accumulations of pigment, abrasion, and interference.

Working with cyan, magenta, and silver—colors drawn from digital color spaces and chromatic aberration—Dorland employs the visual language of compression artifacts, scan lines, and signal interference. Pigment pools, drags, and separates across the surface; paint thickens, fractures, and resists resolution. Perception oscillates between the appearance of a screen artifact and the physical density of paint without fully settling into either.

Each canvas is constructed through repeated grooves and accumulations of pigment dense enough to function structurally. Earlier operations remain active beneath later ones—neither fully visible nor erased, but exerting pressure within the surface. The paintings retain the history of their own construction as material temporality—not explicit record, but tension embedded in the surface that endures without being revealed.

The imagery underlying the paintings originates in AI diffusion models, where images are repeatedly generated and degraded through successive iterations until form begins to destabilize. The paintings do not illustrate this process; rather, they emerge from it. The exhibition features a chrome vinyl floor that transforms the gallery into a continuous reflective field, doubling and distorting the paintings above it.

Across the gallery, the paintings operate as a collective rather than a sequence. Recurring structures emerge in the aggregate—dense horizontal and vertical striations, bands of interference, zones of pressure and release—without resolving into narrative or progression. Each canvas is a discrete operation; together they describe a system. 

Dorland has exhibited nationally and internationally. His first institutional solo exhibition in Europe will open at the Museum gegenstandsfreier Kunst in Otterndorf in June 2026. This spring, Hirmer Publishers will release Chris Dorland: Future Ruins, a monograph by Robert Hobbs.