Predominantly working in acrylic, Christian Franzen utilizes airbrushing and other techniques to render his paintings with the most pristine surface. An assortment of incisions and scratch marks often announce themselves in the final step of Franzen’s process. Using arbitrary objects laying around his studio, such as keys, pins and/or sewing needles, to gauge into his paintings, he vandalizes their smooth surfaces to reveal lighter colored layers underneath. By combining gestural abstraction with the aesthetics of representation, Franzen creates a paradox between two contradictory structures of human expression. This subtle disruption winks at gesture’s potent and complex capacity to symbolize artistic intention without conflating it with human agency.