This work, as seductive as a neon sign in the New York City night, contains a shrewd reflection on contemporary art history. Half‐painting, half‐sculpture, it is part of a ‘worksite’ Lavier began in 2003, in which he appropriated the coloured lines of Frank Stella’s Shaped Canvases—which were shaped to fit the outer contour of the forms that Stella painted onto them—using neon lights instead of paint, in reference to Dan Flavin, another US artist, known for his spectacular installations with factory‐made fluorescent tubes.Lavier has drawn on a specific series of Stella’s from the early 1960s calledPersian Paintings (the title, Baft, like the other pieces in the same series of Lavier’s, is the name of a city in Iran). The specificity of the paintings in Stella’s series is that they were made with fluorescent paint. Lavier has replaced the surprising illusion of light emanating from the fluorescent paint with real neon light, bringing the high relief of the originals dramatically to the fore. With this hybrid of painting and sculpture, he is pushing Stella’s logic of ‘what you see is what you see’ to the limit. Both the fluorescent paint and the neon lights challenge the standard of the literalness of the canvas that was so central to American Minimalism.