A tiny boat hovers on the surface of the picture like a splotchy swipe of diluted ink.
The crowd does not rush toward you or away from you, but flows parallel to the surface of the picture.
The uniform pale russet background, which is notionally a flat wall behind the woman, can easily read as the flat painted surface of the picture.
When the light is right, it is nearly impossible to tell which lines are stems and which reflections, so the surface of the picture is scribbled over with little mathematical puzzles and irregular geometric forms.
It was localised into blandness, it sat on the surface of the picture and it worked as icing on the cake of form: "Look what a pretty patch I am".
In each case the artist has altered the signage, either by respelling it or adding phrases in Spanish, with the changes spelled out in thread on the surface of the picture.
The Cubist style emphasized the flat, two-dimensional surface of the picture plane, rejecting the traditional techniques of perspective, foreshortening, modeling, and chiaroscuro, and refuting time-honoured theories that art should imitate nature.
In the early 16th-century, Parmigianino looked at himself in a convex mirror and painted his distorted reflection, his huge hand close to the surface of the picture, his face the focus of a selfie-like bubble image, in which time and space warp vertiginously.
They are swathed in metallic, shining bursts of drapery like a halo, an aura that bathes and blesses them, as if they are enclosed in the moment of their union and it sprays them with molten gold, which on the surface of the picture is as shining and wet as it is monumental.
The show focuses on van Gogh's tendency to depict nature in close-up, either in teeming detail or with a highly compressed sense of space, sometimes achieved by high horizon lines and thick brushwork that flatten the image and appear to push the surface of the picture close to the viewer.
