Echoes of Form
Featuring works by Winnie Weiyun Szu and Matthew Herriot
Curated by Héloïse Paillard
Mayfield – 505 Marengo Ave, Forest Park, IL 60130
January 31st – April 6th 2026

Mayfield is pleased to present ‘Echoes of Form’, an exhibition foregrounding visual perception and abstraction through the parallel practices of Winnie Weiyun Szu and Matthew Herriot.

Most often in our visual experience, we look but there is so much that we do not see. We look at a road but we don’t pay attention to the reflections and lights flashing across it; we look at a tree but we don’t notice the dappled light piercing through it; we glance at a building but we miss the softness of one wall in sunlight against another in shade.

An abstract painting, a flat surface containing brushstrokes and colors, free from direct real-world associations and not anxious to communicate anything in particular, is a site for our visual attention to wander and concentrate on details that most often go unnoticed—such as warmer versus cooler hues, compression versus expansion of space, or scattered fragments of light versus hazy modulations in tone. Through attending to how something is rather than what it is, abstraction offers an opportunity to re-engage and reflect on the incredible human capacity for visual perception and to find enjoyment in the richness of that experience.

The practices of Winnie Weiyun Szu and Matthew Herriot both lay claim to this proposition, but from alternate approaches. Szu constructs pictorial space that resembles the organization of a landscape without explicitly depicting one. Her work is also deeply concerned with how perception forms the basis of existence itself, holding space for things that cannot be seen all at once. In her work, looking becomes a way of assembling the world moment by moment, as if each brushstroke is a record of what can be sensed even when memory offers no definitive picture.

Herriot’s work, on the other hand, interrogates the capacity for paintings to function as both a surface and window: the aluminum substrate and textured paint flicker between material presence and optical depth. Each painting results from layers of paint scraped across metal until the accumulation of forms, edges, transparencies, and interruptions begins to cohere as a space.

In ‘Echoes of Form’, Szu and Herriot exemplify a reluctance to see painting as inherently referential, instead giving their works freedom to refer to nothing but themselves. In doing so, they shift focus from quick image recognition to an active, ongoing perceptual experience, insisting that paintings can only be fully known through close visual attention, one small observation at a time.

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