Rice, Cactus Sap, Marble Dust: What Three Painters Are Putting Into Their Surfaces This Spring

♦ ♦ ♦ MAY 25, 2026 | 4 MIN READ Rice, Cactus Sap, Marble Dust: What Three Painters Are Putting Into Their Surfaces This Spring At a Glance Reading the painting coverage from Frieze NY 2026 alongside the Allison Katz show at Hauser & Wirth Wooster, the same thread shows up in three painters. They are not just textured. They are making canvases that physically *weigh more*. There is a passage I keep coming back to in Frieze’s “Five Emerging Artists to Watch at Frieze New York 2026,” published around the fair’s 13–17 May 2026 run. It describes Abraham González Pacheco’s work for Campeche in the Focus section, Stand F03, with one of the most precise material lists I have read in fair coverage in years: “pigments, soil, graphite and charcoal agglutinated with cactus sap and salt on paper” Read that as a working painter and the first thing that registers is not the symbolism. It is the weight. Cactus sap as binder is a wet load that dries permanent. Salt adds crystalline mass. Soil, on paper, is real grams. By the time that piece is on a wall it is heavier than the same paper would be carrying oil. That changes how a courier crates it, how a registrar logs it, and how a private installer cleats it. Then walk into Hauser & Wirth Wooster, where Allison Katz’s “Outta the Bag” runs from 30 April through 24 July 2026, and look at the medium line on Burden (2026) and Jaws (2026): oil and rice on linen. Not sand. Rice. What rice and cactus sap and marble dust have in common The third painter in the thread is Scott Olson, also in the Frieze 2026 painting coverage and a regular at James Cohan. Olson builds his surfaces with marble dust and rabbit-skin glue, then layers store-bought oil paint over Renaissance-gesso recipes. The marble-dust ground is significantly denser than a standard acrylic gesso. The painting sits on the wall as a heavier object. These three painters, working in three cities, doing three completely different image programs, are converging on something I do not think the coverage has named yet. They are all making canvases that weigh more than the standard painting of the last decade. Rice grains, salt crystals, marble dust, soil, dried cactus sap. Each one is a material that adds mass without trying to look like it is doing anything theatrical. The opposite move dominated painting for most of the 2010s. Thin oil, smooth grounds, image-first surfaces engineered to read well in JPEGs and Instagram crops. The work was made for the screen as much as for the wall. A canvas that weighed less than two kilos was a feature, not a problem. The painter’s read on why this is happening now I think what is going on is that a generation of painters has stopped trusting the screen as the primary delivery surface for what they make. When the image has to translate through a phone camera and a feed compression, weight does not transmit. So weight gets sacrificed. When the image is being made for someone to live with, weight is information. It tells th