Alongside his participation in the ongoing 82nd Whitney Biennial, Kamrooz Aram delves into a freer system of optic formations in his new solo exhibition in New York.
There is a gentle negotiation in Kamrooz Aram’s paintings. A fierce agreement on form and depth, the back-and-forth of his work spills over onto the viewer’s positioning in front of ornately deviant abstractions. A sway up close is essential in grasping the New York-based artist’s tactile details, as well as taking a step back to plunge into his caressing vortexes of vibrant colouration.
In his new exhibition, Infrequencies, at Alexander Gray Associates, Aram outlines blossoming rounded patterns that grow vertically on linen surfaces. Like branches with unpredictable divergences, the motifs expand and populate each kinetic configuration. Energy triggers this negotiation, in which bulbous outings burst with a vigorous agency before settling into a unanimous harmony in which chance and determination can coexist.
Here, Aram leaves behind the grid system which often grounds his petal-like motifs. Now unrestrained from an encapsulating geometry, the floral elements spring freely across the surface and grow with autonomy. This new path also yields a pliability in the artist’s handling of an abstraction which nods to Islamic ornamentation traditions, as well as to the refusal of a Western eye to rationalise the visual codings of these motifs. Untethered swollen shapes linger and mingle, rubbing with one another in an abundance that signals an art historical confrontation. A freed painterly hand shatters the expectations of control and self-erasure; the anticipation of a rigid finale also crushes down with each painting’s subjective growth in lieu of any rigid network.
Against the grid’s systematic and predetermined layout, Aram’s paintings from the last six years ooze and dare: they bleed into each other and claim their borders. However, they avoid occupying or transforming their neighbours and what they alchemise with. They rub and bubble. In a medley of orbs and crescents, the artist conducts a malleable dreamscape of colour and form that is deeply ingrained into the surface of each painting. Each disposition feels innate to its linen surface, like flora and fauna growing out of its soil.
An aquatic musing is starkly evident in Diligent Flâneur (2020), in which watery hues of blue lend themselves to wavy bulbs with soft kisses from a bold red. Aram has lip-like quaint crimsons flirting with generous washes of azures in oil, crayon and wax pencil as he gently grabs a sense of tremor, an almost-mobility that arises from his energised strokes between a clear desire and an openness to what may come. Exuberant Flâneuse (2020) possesses a breeziness which likely blows out of the surface through the painter’s aerial reference. Between bold reds, thick greens and energetic yellows, he hides openings which resemble the blue sky populated by puffy clouds. This feeling of closing and revealing suggests an architectural sheen to the juxtaposition, giving a welded quality to the outline of the forms. But all is to be imagined in an exploration of the show. Under the gilded Tribeca storefront’s soaring ceilings, where intricate columns guard the paintings, one should savour Aram’s works with a degree of letting-go, finding yourself lost amidst his hopping abstractions – not unlike the flâneur referenced in two of the paintings’ titles – accompanies a dizzying sense of completeness.
Meanwhile, Murmurations (2023) boils with a liquidity that allows patterns to float with a humming rhythm. An echo is almost audible in turquoise knobs and icy wing-like shapes, and from their liberated roaming rises a gush of potentials beyond the limits of a painting’s physicality. What Aram chooses to illustrate – out of countless other possibilities – serves to embody what the eye does not see but may instead muse upon.
If infrequencies are rare gifts to encounter, however disarmingly, Aram’s paintings strive to embody their fleeting appearances in both sight and mind. Like an ethereal wind that is always a breath away, they visualise the afterthoughts and urges, bubbling intents and curiosities that an artist harnesses beyond the grid’s regimented preoccupations.
Infrequencies runs until 11 April
