The Brooklyn Rail

To comprehend the nine paintings in Marina Adams’s show, we ought to consider crystal formation and flower blooming. One involves chemistry, the other botany, but both can only take place when certain conditions prevail, conditions beyond human intention, devoid of consciousness. And both engender objects of geometric precision and symmetry. Entelechy, the seemingly automatic flow of events that leads, inevitably, to the crystal or the flower lurks within Adams’s work.

To be clear: Adams does not practice anything like the automatic writing (or painting) advocated by the Surrealists, but nevertheless, something must take place in her subconscious that sets into motion her painterly practice. These wonderful canvases begin somewhere within Adams, somewhere she herself might not be able to locate easily, and then work their way into facticity, that public domain where they acquire a life independent of the artist while bearing the invisible signature of their creator and the very visible trace of her hand. In other words, Adams brings her geometric structures into being using her own hand, leaving a trace of her subjectivity in every wavering line.

Hanging alone in a partitioned-off, rear part of the gallery is Singing to the Highest Deity (2020), an 88-by-78-inch acrylic on linen. Isolating this work gives the viewer the opportunity to examine a single piece and not have it blurred by the distracting presence of other paintings. This brilliant canvas, whose colors seem to be more vivid than those in the other works, constitutes an assertion of the biological, the personal, and the sexual elements in Adams’s painting. The crystalline geometry expressed by loosely drawn triangles (a recurring motif in her practice), frames a central configuration, an orange shape with a roughly drawn blue ellipse at its center. The blue ellipse captures the viewer’s eye, and we realize we are staring at a womb. It is as if we are looking through a female body from the inside: a blue mandorla shape, perhaps an unconscious allusion to the aureole of traditional religious iconography but most certainly a female sex. We are seeing Adams’s creative process, an amalgamation of geometric, crystalline entelechy ensconced within a woman’s body. A species of autobiography in the shape of an icon.

If Singing to the Highest Deity evokes the microcosm, the world within Adams, then Someone Has Walked this Way Before (for Lorenzo Thomas) (2025), a 70-by-50-inch acrylic on linen represents the macrocosm. This is a landscape, and because of landscape’s cosmic connotations, it clearly alludes to the overall title of Adams’s show, Cosmic Repair. A landscape is a representation of order or wholeness, the bringing into balance of dynamic forces that otherwise could express themselves in anarchic chaos. Sky above, mountains, land, then water below, all held in the harmony only feasible in the work of art. This reinvention of an entire landscape tradition signals Adams’s knowledge that she is part of something larger, a history. Like so many traditional Chinese representations of nature, this painting is a consecration of the natural order, one that humans all too often desecrate.

The titles Adams gives to her works are important links between herself as an individual and her paintings, which in themselves avoid most narrative possibilities. NO KINGS (2025), Out of the Ashes (for Palestine) (2024–25), or Anti-Fascist Flower (for Alice Notley) (2025) allude to events or ideas currently at play in American society. They are links then between the art and the real world, but they also show how tentative and arbitrary such links are. To try to derive some notion of “content” from these titles is an enterprise doomed to failure because the works themselves do not refer to any concrete reality. The titles are Adams’s personal information, but they in no way impinge on our understanding of her work.

The great pleasure the paintings in Cosmic Repair confer derives from the dynamism she captures in the tension between process and finality, the work of art as a conjunction of contrary energies held in stasis. They may not make us better people, but they certainly make us happier people. Or, as the title of one of her works suggests so succinctly, Beauty Is Its Own Excuse for Being (2025): joy is in the eye of the beholder.