Dueling Squares positions an ovoid composition within a diamond shaped frame. Like the multitude of vibrantly colored squares underpinning the top layer of white, the painting itself is surrounded by a gleaming, white, diamond-shaped frame. The title is a coy reference to the duality of whiteness pitted against color, and of an organic form encased by something rigid. The painting belongs to Little’s ongoing series of White Paintings, which demonstrate his dual sensibility towards formal aesthetics and socio-political subtext. Topped with a glossy, vicious stratus of white oil paints that has been pierced with a geometric lattice, their surfaces pop with a vibrant interplay of color and void. “The White Paintings are more or less experiments in color,” Little says. “The thing you see first is the last layer of paint, which is white. But if you look beyond the surface, within the squares and circles there’s a whole universe of activity.” Little’s White Paintings keep changing with extended looking, almost as if animated. When asked what he most hopes people take home with them after an encounter with his paintings, Little answers with his trademark combination of sincerity and wit: “Emotion. It’s about getting as much feeling out of the work as you can. There’s not a lot of verbiage surrounding what I do. You’re not gonna get a syllabi on my Black identity, or anything like that. The art world is overloaded with rhetoric and jargon. Just stop and put it on the wall and let’s see what happens. If it performs, it performs. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. To have to explain it is what creates the deficit for me. Those things get in the way of having an experience with the art.”