Louis Eisner's solo show Puzzled Panther at Bernheim Gallery in Zurich brings together paintings on canvas and copper plates mixing the autobiographical with the canonical; it runs until November 28. The artist discussed the show with Addis Goldman in an interview published by BOMB Magazine.

The show takes its title from a painting of the artist's brother on a sofa, named for lyrics by Darby Crash of the punk band the Germs. Eisner describes his brother as elusive and panther-like, a spectral protagonist at the centre of a show he says is about being confused, about the difficulty of capturing the experience of living as time moves forward.

The works draw on two kinds of source material: masterpieces as remembered from textbook pages, margins and all, and home printouts of the artist's distorted photographs, reproduced by hand down to printer drag lines and colour separation. Each image is built in black and white and then glazed with transparent colour once dry, a method Eisner compares to the way Raphael worked five centuries ago, giving the paintings the look of colourised Technicolor images.

The copper plates are trompe l'oeil pages, imagined rather than copied from real textbooks, showing paintings Eisner loves and has altered to his taste. He begins with photographs, manipulates them in Photoshop, and paints from printouts, so the flaws of the technology travel into the finished work. When he reproduces a canonical image, he says, he feels he becomes its original author, with no distance between himself and the picture.

The show's largest work is a painting of an empty green room, based on a photograph Eisner took himself. Empty rooms, he says, store memories, where lives have been lived and new life may someday arrive. The picture is also a meditation on contingency and nostalgia, on the moment between something having just happened and something about to happen. A Wallace Stevens poem, The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm, gives another work its title, The Reader Became the Book; Eisner says he wants the state the poem describes, where the reader simply becomes the book.