Rachel Hecker’s new paintings in her current exhibition my world is really small and you are in it at Texas Gallery are a lot like the artist herself; they display a hard-as-nails formal perfection that surrounds a great big beating heart. The paintings in Hecker’s first solo show since 2002 depict handwritten lists, notes and appointments jotted on a wide range of random and ephemeral paper from hotel stationary to post-it notes. She amplifies these notes and scribbles by blowing them up to nearly twenty times their original size and painting them on canvas in a flawlessly crisp style that walks a tightrope between fetishism and invisibility.

While her paintings are rooted in the history of Pop artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Hecker’s intention seems dramatically different. Where classic Pop artists made works that commented on a larger culture, Hecker’s paintings revolve around philosophies that ultimately find their beginning and end in a very personal realm.

The most interesting turn in Hecker’s relationship to the Pop Art canon lies in her incorporation of the elegiac qualities of that period that many current artists increasingly recognize. Her Warhol is not the Warhol of the early Factories and wild parties but the Warhol that emerged after he was shot and as he gradually became more and more obsessed with religion and death.

Hecker’s meticulously recreated handwritten text on top of a meticulously recreated "While-You-Were-Out" note functions both as a doubling and a cancellation of the Pop Art impulse. Rather than trying to “be a machine” as Warhol once famously stated he wanted to be, Hecker recreates the clean look of the machine by hand. In doing this, she communicates to the viewer an investment of time that ultimately translates into an investment of life-time. Time spent painting is time spent dying.

Hecker also distances herself from painting per se in the installation of her paintings in the gallery. Instead of hanging them on the wall, she stacks the paintings, one on top of another along the two longest walls of the gallery. However, as with her engagement with Pop Art, Hecker’s primary motivation is not to provide an institutional critique of the gallery space, but to recreate a personal space; the space of the refrigerator door, the desk drawer or the studio wall. As always, her work brings us back to a space that can only be described as personal and profoundly human.

Michael Bise is an artist living and working in Houston.