JOHNNY ABRAHAMS
A SPRINT FOR THE IDLER

OPENING: SATURDAY, JANUARY 16TH, 2021
EXHIBITION DATES: JAN. 16 - FEB. 27, 2021

Romer Young Gallery is pleased to present its second solo exhibition with artist Johnny Abrahams. A Sprint for the Idler will be on view Saturday, January 16th through Saturday, February 27th.

Abrahams' paintings are abstractions, characterized by large geometric forms painted in oil and acrylic on raw burlap and canvas in black, red and yellow. Through repetition and subtle interactions between the void and painted form, the compositions convey rhythm, phrasing, cadence and an unmistakable melodic character.

To come to understand this new body of work is to explore the artist’s affinity with musical thought and to draw a series of analogies to various modes of musical composition. Many reductive artists, Abrahams included, have studied musical composition and drawn inspiration from the extraordinary richness in musical structure and systematic formal logic. Sol Lewitt described listening to music as experiencing ‘form in time’ and his work ‘aspired to the condition of music.’ Lewitt used the grid as a guiding structure to mirror the division of the octave into twelve equal semitones. The grid becomes the organizing principle for an art of serial variation, a means of “ordering the inchoate messiness of reality.” For Abrahams, “something about the order and boundaries, and the deliberate and willful variation/deviation of these boundaries provides a suitable framework for certain types of abstraction.”

“These paintings have a power that is difficult to locate...It’s as if the compositions were some sort of snapshot taken in the middle of a phased melody with the listener unsure if the two parts have just started echoing, have moved far enough to double each other, descended into chaotic ringing, or are headed back almost toward unison.”

Deceptively simple, Abrahams’ paintings present a unique vocabulary of shapes, sparse but distinct color, texture from the drag of a brush, and the negative space of raw canvas. These are the only elements. Rather than anchoring the viewer to a known order, the artist subtly undermines the structure as if to say “start anywhere, it doesn’t matter.” The idea that art as a reality-organizing activity is based on fundamental structures (a predetermined set of musical intervals or a plane of criss crossing lines) is endlessly compelling to the artist. Much of the drama in these paintings can be discovered in how they both reference and avoid any fixed structure. The shapes seem familiar but are just slightly askew and just a little closer than we might have placed them. It is this particular moment of subtlety where the tension and drama are created. The composition of each painting seems to be a snippet of a pattern the viewer has no access to, suggesting a melody and then deviating from it, setting up a resolution and then arriving at an unexpected note. Balance without symmetry.

Whether it be notes or grids, the idea of art as a reality-organizing activity is fundamental to the artist’s practice. Abrahams’ compositions are less a way of ordering reality than they are a way of simply drawing attention to it. The work invites meditation, but not a passive meditation with the goal of calming and soothing the viewer into complacency. The work invites an active meditation that challenges the viewer to question the social construction of categories and borders, and to tear grids apart in elaborative thought.

For additional information, please contact the gallery at 415.550.7483 or email info@romeryounggallery.com.