Lincoln Perry and David Summers: On Reflection 

Les Yeux du Monde is pleased to announce On Reflection, a two-person exhibition featuring new work by Lincoln Perry and David Summers. The exhibition opens with a reception on Saturday, February 28th, from 4:00 to 6:00 PM, and will be on view through Saturday, April 4th, 2026. Together, these artists’ work offers a nuanced meditation on reflection—both as a reflexive encounter between the viewer and the viewed, and as the process through which seeing is refracted into image, memory, and thought.

Lincoln Perry presents a new series of watercolors set within museums, depicting visitors as they encounter masterworks of art. Some viewers study closely, others pass by without a glance, while still others linger in moments of intimacy, distraction, or conversation. Perry’s works highlight the dynamic relationship between viewer and artwork, capturing the museum as a space of reflection in multiple senses. Reflection becomes social as well as personal as Perry creates a mirror between viewers and painting, illuminating art’s ability to offer back to us something of our own human experience. He writes, “I’ve been moved by all the art depicted; our often reprehensible species can feel pride in the creations I’ve spent my life looking at and trying to emulate.” By positioning us as observers of other observers, Perry creates a double-reflection: we are at once the audience in the room and the subject on the paper, effectively turning the viewer’s own gaze into the final, essential element of the composition.  His works convey the implicit connection between artist, artwork, and viewer, the endlessly varied ways we see, and what looking can reveal about ourselves. 

David Summers shares new still life paintings that engage reflection as both an optical and philosophical phenomenon. By studying transparent and reflective forms, Summers’ paintings capture the elusive properties of light and offer a window into the nature of sight itself. His work deeply considers seeing as a physical encounter with reflected color—an experience that only becomes thought and understanding through the mind’s own act of second reflection. Summers connects the exhibition’s title to John Locke, who described sensation and reflection as the two “fountains of knowledge.” Summers writes: “We are much more familiar in our empiricist habits with the first ‘fountain,’ but for Locke, reflection was the way in which the mind is able to discover itself by seeing what consciousness does or has done with sensation.” For Summers, painting itself is a reflection, an immediate response in which an aspect of individual and human meaning may be made clear, or brought into focus. In their quiet detail, his works invite sustained inquiry into the mysteries of sight, making both the initial reflection of light and its subsequent reflection in painting visible to the viewer.

Together, Perry and Summers approach reflection from complementary angles: one through meta-narrative scenes of observation, the other through rigorous studies of light and thought. On Reflection invites viewers to consider how our experience is shaped not only by what we see, but by what the mind makes of seeing, and the endless reflections that create our shared reality. 

Lincoln Perry attended Columbia University, received his MFA from Queens College, and has been a professor of art at the universities of New Hampshire, Arkansas, and Virginia. In addition to his work as an esteemed easel painter, Perry has completed major murals at Cabell Hall at the University of Virginia; Lincoln Square, 1700 Pennsylvania Avenue, and One Penn Plaza in Washington, D.C.; the Federal Courthouse in Tallahassee, Florida; and the Met Life Building in St. Louis, Missouri. He is the author of Seeing Like an Artist, Lincoln Perry’s Charlottesville, and a selection of his watercolors illustrates a 2012 edition of Henry David Thoreau’s essay “October, or Autumnal Tints.” Perry’s work is also featured in the PBS documentary, The Murals of Lincoln Perry.

David Summers holds a B.A. from Brown University and a Ph.D. from Yale University. A distinguished art historian as well as a celebrated painter, he served as the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Art Theory and Italian Renaissance Art at the University of Virginia from 1984 to 2015, following appointments at Bryn Mawr College and the University of Pittsburgh. Summers was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996 and has written multiple books, including the influential, 700+ page, Real Spaces: World Art History, and his more recent manifesto for the Louvre Abu Dhabi, A World Vision of Art.