The Brooklyn Rail

That the eleven non-representational paintings on view in Enzo Shalom’s solo show hang in a room that Bortolami Gallery refers to as “The Upstairs” seems uncannily resonant. On the one hand, this is because the works, all of which are untitled and made in 2024, convey merging grounds and surfaces perceived from beneath, within, and above as if via suspended vantages. On the other, the paintings possess a unifying grammar of levity, residing in their touch and tone, that marries the quietude and sun-soaked remove of the second-floor venue. To be sure, there is something unmoored about these terrestrial abstractions—a sensibility that is affirmed by a different aspect of the display. Shalom has foregone conventional exhibition apparatus, withholding both an exhibition title and a press release that would otherwise plot this body of work along a lineage replete with interpretive explanations or biographical offerings. Instead, what results is an unusual proximity with one’s own observational facilities, a calibration of shifts, drifts, deferrals, and resolutions that hum in the interstitial ties and intransitive forms uniting the works. This coherence, a kind of continuous murmur, directs a mode of emergent understanding: forms that settle if only to unfix, dissolve if only to resurface, and assert if only to give way. These paintings might be regarded as cryptic cartographies, autonomously referring to their own notations of place rather than reproducing elsewhere.

The works on view beckon instinctual suggestions of fogged memory, fluctuating senses, and emotional incursions. Willingly carrying this subjective excess, the paintings still keep a restrained temperament—inducing an enigmatic potency in their indeterminate stance toward perception and meaning. For example, there is a tenderness to the way the paint behaves materially. In certain passages or along select edges and borders, overpainted, erased, and scumbled pigments condense into burdened masses as loosened marks nearby diffuse this pressure. Even in compositions with minimal painterly intervention, frottage, pasted-paper, and buried traces signal the dual subtractive and transitive logic of the artist’s process of sustained contact. Often, erasure builds up spectral forms. Such rhythmic redirection exists not only within a single painting but also in the secreted dialect established among them.

Irregular patterns and devices recur, like trembling and dashed lines that comprise scaffolds not unlike bridges, passageways, and embankments. Still, when these fragmented structures are suggested across paintings, they evade mimetic exactitude and illusory stability, as if the artist were training and untraining his own observations. An always-altering syntax of line also produces an errant and meandering pace. Routine art historical descriptors don’t quite get at these configurations and may be better grasped by anatomic, directional, or geologic terms: joint, spine, hip, hinge, passage, trespass, scrim, webbing, trench, fissure, fault-line. Some strokes adopt a languid torpidity and others a tensile speed, as with the diagonally oriented dividers that interject into the pictorial field. This oblique is found in pendant tableaux displayed side by side, showing the various attitudes a single form can hold and displace. In one, a high-key vermillion cuts a spatial clearing in muted hues. Inversely, in the painting to its right, a jostle of brown lines sits flush against a sand-colored ground while a translucent silvery-grey band disrupts the earthen scene, fostering a tempered oscillation from warm to cool. Deposits of the same pigment imperfectly retrace arched pentimenti or lightly veil pockets of negative space, raising another tendency toward vacillation, this time between values of opacity and transparency.

An adjacent slate-green painting makes this dynamic more explicit: a draped fabric traverses a progression of four spatial compartments, one of which is demarcated in white chalk. At its center, the brushwork articulates deep folds and venous skeins. Yet, where it would be presumably affixed to a wall at its apex, the bundle of fabric dissipates into a gossamer wash. Likely referencing Gothic sources, the fluctuating degrees of finish and unfinish give visual expression to the anachronistic slippage sparked by handling paintings and the medium’s historical load. To this point, just as quickly as visual cultural references are summoned, such linear assurances step away. This is where the artist’s work recalls the distortions and fragility inherent to transposing idioms. That tradition, itself a contingent construct, unbinds at the very moment of its rearticulation. This apparent snapback occurs in one especially elusive/allusive example, an ostensible nod to Picasso’s tragicomic harlequin in which a decontextualized fragment of the character’s diamond-patterned costume offers an improvisatory structure. Here, the lattice-work frays into thinly dispersed violets and greys as if worn by time’s passage and its own connotative density. Throughout, these closely hued, nearly imperceptible splinters accompany spatial gaps, gliding planes, and dissonant pathways that simultaneously tarry and join. A way of seeing that is embodied, searched.