The paintings of Zach Harris (b. 1976, Santa Rosa, California) are amalgams of mystical imagery, illusionistic patterning, and intricate figuration. They are among the most original objects produced under the rubric of contemporary painting. Harris develops intimate vignettes into elaborately sculpted and refined frameworks, simultaneously focusing the viewer’s attention and expanding it over a multi-dimensional plane. Recalling cosmological diagrams and visionary folk art, as well as a diversity of Eastern and Western art-historical traditions from devotional icons to Color Field, Harris’s constructions are born of the sustained attention one might associate with medieval illuminators. Each constitutes an entire cosmology, complete with recurring characters (both earthly and divine) and radical ideas about the action of gravity, light and time. As Harris has remarked, “Within a single small shape one can detect worlds within worlds where logic fields resolve and contrast endlessly with one another.”