In this series, the curatorial team presents one work from the Meural art library we find essential. (See all installments.)

I’d once heard that much of our knowledge of the physical dynamics of water is owed to video game development. While water dynamics would normally be the domain of physicists, it was coders, forced to remake reality, that had to solve it. In their world there’s no faking it; for a gamer, it either feels like water or it doesn’t.

Below the Surface (2017) by Julie Siracusa doesn’t just seem like water—it makes us reconsider the thing. While scientists (and coders) are tasked with getting life right, artists have the joy of interpreting it. It’s why there are so many methods to paint water (see all the ways David Hockney alone brings it to life), each approaching the slippery stuff from a different angle.

That there is such a range of ways to paint water is owed, of course, to the fact no one is actually painting water. It’s see-through; artists merely depict the ways in which it distorts what lies behind, and, more to the point, the ripples, billows, and breaks that somehow form outlines, zones, topographical patterns. Look into Below the Surface long enough and you’ll feel like you’re staring at a map (ironically, one from above). But unlike a map, the terrain we’re witnessing hardly lasts a moment. It’s a wonder our brains can so easily compute what the work is—we rarely witness water that’s both frozen still and abstracted.

The colors do a lot of the work, but even there Siracusa takes liberties. We have something close to black seeping through on the left, and skittering along in the lower right hand corner. The murky teals that surround it isn’t often found in a true blue swimming pool. There’s pure white and more expected blues, but they seem to be the anomaly in this off-kilter color spectrum.

Like many great abstract artists, Siracusa takes a concept and pulls it to the boundary of recognition. It’s there we end up asking ourselves the heady, occasionally obnoxious, bewilderingly simple questions that only art can give us. In this case: when we look at water, what are we actually seeing?

— Andrew Lipstein, Head of Editorial