The exhibition highlights artists who take up the figurative line and with it explore subject formation and its transgression. Despite their diversity, each artist shares an interest in locating the line at which figuration becomes legible and legibility becomes constraint. The artists in the exhibition all make use of painting’s capacity to amount to personal languages through which the painter can firstly (and ultimately) answer their own questions and preoccupations—a poetic form of parley for self-exploration. Legible to their audiences or not, each of these vernaculars suggests painting as a way to construct or de-construct the self, or challenge, decode, and perhaps even extend it through intimate forms of conversation— ‘a voice answering a voice’.