Vigo Gallery
VIGO is pleased to announce our fifth solo show with Johnny Abrahams to be held at our gallery in Masons Yard from 04-27 May 2022. Deceptively simple, these paintings present a unique vocabulary of satisfying meditative yet rhythmic shapes rendered with a rich texture which plays strongly with the negative space of the raw canvas.
The relationships between the symbols that are Abraham’s alphabet are dependent on nothing other than themselves. There is sense of musicality to the compositions which convey rhythm, phasing, and cadence with an unmistakable melodic character. In series they intend to set the viewer up with both theme and variant, creating a simultaneous sense of both comfort and dissonance, hinting at a never realised pattern.
Abrahams craves a sense of balance without symmetry. The composition of each painting serves as an intro to an overall pattern the viewer has only partial access to suggesting a melody and then deviating from it, setting up a resolution and then arriving at an unexpected note. The forms within the compositions and the variations between individual paintings are experienced in the way microtones are experienced by a musician using a twelve-tone scale. The shapes seem familiar yet slightly askew and it this is where the tension and drama are created, as they reference and avoid his self imposed structures.
