From afar, Byron Kim’s Muffled (2019) appears to depict a dusty Martian crater, with a shaded clump lurking under diffused golden hues. Walk closer and the painting takes on the guise of a microscopic image showing the wound of a fuzzy, yellow peach. After a moment of further inspection, the canvas’s subtle web of tiny red lines evokes the expansive capillary networks under our skin. In this way, Kim’s latest bruise paintings investigate the resonances between human and celestial bodies, bringing to mind fleshy contusions, planets, and nebulae. The series is rooted in poet Carl Phillips’ comparison of the sunlit lesion on a lover’s body to “something like amber.” Kim began to see bruises as stains layered under human skin, and associated these strata with other phenomenon, such as zigzagging landscapes, as in The Valleys are Asleep and the Mountaintops (2019); a mass of bees in The Swarm to the Hive (2019); and the relics of bygone civilizations, in Distant Ancient (2016).