This exhibition brings together seven artists stretched across two centuries. The contemporary artists I’ve chosen for this show address the formal and conceptual strains found in Henri Matisse and Bob Thompson. Each artist is concerned with the materiality of paint, its saturation and density as it relates to facture and form.

Iranian artist Kamrooz Aram makes paintings on a fault line. The artist studied in the US. Islamic art, with its ornamentation and geometric patterns, has generally been regarded in the West as decorative and, therefore unserious. The Western sensibility designated the applied arts—tapestries, rugs, ceramics, miniature paintings—as beautiful, but far too functional. The fine arts, having no inherent use value, were free to pursue loftier aims.

In his Arabesque series, Aram makes use of overlapping arches, stars, and arabesque form on a planar grid. The artist has a lexicon of muted underpaintings, black drawn silhouettes, bright saturated color, transparent washes, and a distinct use of rectangular borders. The framing and staging of his compositions is offset by paint drips, pencil markings and grid lines, his process revealed to be part of the total work.

Aram’s painting Angelus Novus (Renegotiated), (2011) is the exhibition title and also refers to Paul Klee’s painting of 1920. Here, faint floral patterns in cadmium red and cobalt blue are set against a phthalo green and ochre ground contrasted by black gestural passages that circle the perimeter of the painting. A small red circle lies at the bottom left of the canvas contrasted by a large black triangle in the upper right. In the center, where the angel’s face meets ours, lie three white triangles and one white diamond. The work’s luminosity and central composition create a decidedly sublime effect, as if to say that the face of the angel, and their gaze into the past and future, cannot be seen at all.

(excerpt) Jason Stopa, The Angel of History Looks Back, 2025

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