There are three epidermises separating me from the subjects of Anna Weyant’s newest paintings. Rue de Castiglione is clothed in delicate shrouds of late-November rain. To access the 28-year-old artist’s show The Guitar Man, we pass through the drapes of wafting droplets, cold window glass, and at last, the towering columns of Gagosian’s Paris installation.

I arrive with my sister and a friend from the States who I met in person the day before. For the past year, we have been pen-pals of a strange sort, occasionally fighting over Koons’ modern fetish, or discussing the aesthetic repercussions of Bellmer’s Poupée. When traversing the small space, our conversation, yet again, wanders towards the question of surface.

Most notoriously, the skin of Weyant’s subjects is painted with such realism that the artist, when sharing her pieces on social media, supplements a caption tinged with a certain self-irony: "this is a painting—please don’t report". The phrase is easily verified via first inspection of the works that constitute her European solo debut.

Meticulous brushstrokes give shape to soft limbs and satin-like skin that approximates the mellow hues of antique lace. Cultivated in the figurative works of The Guitar Man, Weyant achieves a skillful quotation of the sensual chiaroscuro of Dutch Golden Age portraiture. Yet, when prolonging the observation, we notice a perceptual shift. At once, the girls appear to grow cold-skinned, hardening into porcelain dolls. Supple and severe at the same time, they call to mind an obscure passage from The Softest Hard by Berlin electropop duo Easter. "Poke it with a stick is it hard or is it soft. We boiled it for an hour, and we kept it in our loft."

Curiously, this captures the tone of the exhibited works: neat girl-figures aggregated in an intermediate state between soft and hard, framed alongside plastic-flower still lives in the usual dark greens and yellows, presented in the storefront-turned dollhouse that is Weyant’s interpretation of the Gagosian space. We ask ourselves of the overpowering instinct. To poke, or to window- browse?

The leitmotif of the dollhouse, a thematic reinstitution of Weyant’s first solo show, Welcome to the Dollhouse, at New York’s 56 Henry in late 2019, is instigated unceremoniously by House Exterior (2023), the exhibition’s singular non-portrait reproducing the iconic Bates family house from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. In its depiction of the building as a solitary, hollow carcass, a neglected plaything, the work imparts onto the adjoining portraits a somber off-taste. In lieu of resorting to references to domestic mythology or folklore, the Calgary-born artist draws on the readymade schema of upper-middle-class suburbia, the natal phraseology of the post-war mystery thriller.

In The Guitar Man, the tragicomic narratives that structure Weyant’s oeuvre are imbued with references to genre-classics like Clue, Rear Window, and Eyes Without a Face, swapping the mise-en-scène composition in favor of a more theatric approach that compliments the notion of the voyeuristic "cutaway" motif of the dollhouse as stage.

Weyant’s Girl with a Candlestick, depicting a character in a nightgown, passing through a dark space, most palpably summons this ambience. Carved from a pale fleck of candlelight, the girl’s face appears mask-like, hardly eclipsing her searching gaze and devilish smirk. Akin to House Exterior, there are allusions to a shell-like quality of the subject, although now rendered animate by something that lives inside.

This motive of the uncanny is retrieved in The Return of The Girls Next Door, (2022-23) a triplicate semi-nude Rückenfigur depicting characters with beribboned hair, framed by a sole black color field, which ultimately links the six works. The monochromatic backdrop acts as a co-sculptor to Weyant’s sophisticated shadowing, with the three bodies emerging from the dark like porcelain vessels.

With all of Weyant’s subjects immersed within black color fields, one is compelled to imagine the gallery-space at twilight. Enticed to join in on the curious hide-and-seek, the watcher, by implication, also lays in the dark. While The Girls appear doll-like and serial at first glance, their implicit next-door-proximity, tethered to the discomforting sensation of peering over their exposed shoulders, conjures the impression of vulnerability. Notably, Weyant also incorporates a certain disproportion of the character’s posterior musculature. While the right shoulder is visibly flexed, the left muscle remains soft. We seem to meet them in a transitory state between poise and determination, contemplating their next move.

The exhibited works examine acts of opening and closing, entering, and traversing in more ways than one. Within Weyant’s pointedly laconic microcosm of mystery, walls are opened by means of a single visual contact. The panoptical quality of the dollhouse acts as a scheme, stimulating a particular posture with which the artist lets her female protagonists be observed. Here, the wide-eyed pleasure of play is equated with the pleasure principle of the voyeur, youthful lucidity measured against the permeation of the private. The notions of hard and soft come to mind again, and so does the question of the interior.

While the early mystery thriller let horror-phenomena loom over and invade upscale suburbia, ensuing depictions increasingly circled back to inciting dread via deconstruction of the female body. The genre, especially within its classical installations, is recognized to play on the idea that a threat can arise from inside the body, transgressing its boundaries by being purely metaphysical in nature. This gendered conception, tied to archetypes like the scary young girl, the scream queen, or most prominently, the final girl, is closely linked to societal views of girlhood and female puberty as perplexing, frightening, or even monstrous.

In the canon of western horror, alleged, intangible constructs like innocence, shallowness, or promiscuity were the moral determinants of a character’s path and eventual survival. Despite being modeled after her real-life girlfriends, Weyant’s female subjects are deliberately held in an ad infinitum stage of tweenhood, which the artist herself describes as "a traumatic, dramatic, devastating, and hilarious time."

The confluence of Golden-Age and surrealist sensibilities in her paintings, a merging of mellowness with the eerie in-between of the uncanny, lays the groundwork for a meditation on those tropes as part of The Guitar Man. In diffusing the threshold between hard and soft, like their impending coming-of-age, the artist defers any revelation of the roles and fate of her characters. Inhabiting the borderline between girl and doll, they are not yet made susceptible to the tangible temptations and terrors of the physical world, nor burdened with the relentless stupor of a mannequin.

The hesitance to grow, to firm up, even resounds in Weyant’s This is a Life? (2022-23), depicting a window nook of the Bates-house, in which in a chromed vase bearing a bunch of daisies distortedly mirrors a girl’s vacuous expression. Overhead the flowers, captured in an imperishable plastic-state that reflects the subject’s own condition, the titular phenomenological inquiry is projected onto the dark backdrop.

Now seemingly cognizant of the perpetual suspense, Weyant’s girls brood with a knowing agency we can’t quite comprehend. Never meeting our gaze, one hand tucked secretively behind their backs, the subjects of Girl in the Rain and Girl with a Candlestick appear to be complicit with the artist about what is veiled from the viewer. While the potential to become either abject prey or cold killer is inherent to the figures and scenery constructed by Weyant’s pop-cultural references, both images perish into the remote tomorrow.

Leaving Rue de Castiglione, we remain wondering whether The Guitar Man’s pitch-black backdrops accommodate the halls of a domestic residence or a puppeteer's nimble hands.