Freight + Volume presents Residual Heat, an exhibition of paintings by Jeffrey Heiman. Residual Heat will be on view at the gallery’s 39 Lispenard Street location from March 14 through April 18, 2026. This marks Heiman’s first exhibition with the gallery.
Jeffrey Heiman’s paintings swim in the waters of art history only to re-emerge with an abundance of homoerotic references long visible in plain sight. The figures and objects that fill his frames enact an implicit queering of history. The nude body appears as a site of liberation—not in the sense of spectacular protest, but through the different forms of intimacy it invites. Across these pictures, a searing light renders Heiman’s themes visible, a kind of glorious remembering of physiques just shy of dissolution. The symbolic force of light—elemental, revealing, creative—imbues his works with a formal thrust, capturing a heightened emotionalism which is equally studious.
In Heiman’s paintings, aspects of his own life—what moves him—are tethered to a reappraisal of the art-historical treatment of male nudity. Traditionally, the depiction of the male nude occupied a position distinct from that of the female nude. Even when male nudes were openly displayed in salons and academies, their “queerness” was often downplayed or deemed incidental to the canonical scenes drawn from literature or mythology where they were featured. As a record of personal influences and inspirations, Residual Heat connects this lineage to scenes that lie outside the historically momentous. Absent of myth, Heiman’s paintings memorialize the eroticism of the everyday.
What this entails can be as simple as looking at a lover or a pet: a tranquil exchange of eye contact between sentient beings adrift in the eternal present. This romanticized vision evokes the supernal from ordinary things—the rooms of an apartment, the quality of light gathering around the body of a loved one. Attentive to what institutional history overlooks, Heiman often depicts light as a superabundant source of visibility. Rather than allowing it to dissipate into time’s ever diminishing horizon, he suspends it in a painted amber of space.
The color palette in works such as Sleepover (2025) and Jenny Sleeping (2025) hinges on an intense achromatic brightness whose light nearly burns through what remains after the scene settles into memory. In Golden Hour (2024), erotic tension is held within a radial scrim of light, its gauzy translucency partially veiling the three figures behind a pellucid curtain. In both works, memory and sensuousness converge as light renders bodies accessible to sight—whether this be a golden nude, a sleeping dog, or skeins of illumination complecting a ghostly mirage.
Drawing from a mix of photos sourced on the internet, magazines, and everyday life, Heiman's paintings are only partly biographical. What matters is what they reveal about moments that escape the grid of institutional time, with its epochs, movements, and summary substitutions for lived experience. Heiman reveals an altogether different historical current—one that moves alongside, and at times intervenes in, official narratives of influence and import. Channeling his influences, he canalizes an astral light, with all the visibility it portends, into an afterglow: a saturated psychic space that stages the quiet sacrifice implied in painting the everyday.
-
Jeffrey Heiman is a painter whose work draws on personal memory and art historical references to explore intimacy, absence, and the surreal within domestic or imagined space. Blurring figuration and negative space, his paintings evoke a liminal sense of presence and emotional residue. He has been an Artist in Residence at the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), the Byrdcliffe Artist Colony (Woodstock, NY), Neddy Artist Award Finalist 2022 (Seattle,WA), and recently earned his MFA in Painting from Bard College, he currently lives and works in the Hudson Valley.