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In Dil Hildebrands "Peepshow," formalism meets its match conceptually, spurring a dialogue between material and art history. One enters this solo exhibition of paintings and encounters large-scale works that appear to be blurry photographic images transferred onto canvas. Closer inspection reveals that what appears to be a digital photo is actually a meticulously rendered painting of fragments of Hildebrand’s studio. The artist has taken purposefully blurry digital images of his work space and painted them onto canvas. Then, he has overlaid these photorealistic images with additional thick stripes of colorful paint. In doing so, Hildebrand fragments the subject matter of the studio itself, pushing it into the background. Forcing space into question physically on the canvas, and metaphorically in its representation of foreground and background, the formal accomplishments in the Peepshow series antagonize the tradition of photorealism – a form in art history that has seen painters show off their prolific technical skills by referencing shiny materials (Richard Estess "Telephone Booths," Ralph Goingss "Miss Albany Diner"), reflective surfaces (Alan Michaels "Cars and Houses"), and even blurred images (Gerhard Richters "Ema (Nude on a Staircase)"). While photographic realism in painting is accused of a conceptual 'depthlessness' that achieves technical expertise at the cost of boredom, "Peepshow provokes."

Hildebrand instigates a rethinking of how photorealism operates beyonds just impressing with mimicked details. The artist teases photorealism’s ability to astonish the viewer ("wow — it looks so real!"), with imposing bright painted stripes. The stripes reframe and interrupt the feedback loop of which the visitor is a part: staring at a work of art about art, inside an art world.

Observing a "Peepshow" canvas reminds one of the seductive qualities of voyeurism, that peering into a hidden and often romanticized world — the artist’s studio — may unlock other secrets about living in general. The paintings are invitational in that they attempt to reveal a window into the hidden lair of an artist, but because the images are blurred and metaphorically blocked and framed by thick stripes of colorful paint, there is a sense of inaccessibility. For starters, one can’t help but wonder what Hildebrand’s representation of his own studio says about him as an artist, and as an individual. From the canvases' depiction of a clean and relatively clutter-free studio space, one would conjecture Hildebrand is a disciplined and technical man, but the mere desire to paint one’s own space and present it in a gallery show would also seem to suggest a portrait of an ego as a young artist too.