Firework shows are romantic.
They’re fleeting in a way that draws my fancy after them. By design, their material substance – the actual spectacle of the thing – is entirely temporary, but (at least, in my frame of reference as an American), they attract devotion, even if dutiful.
On the boardwalk, you see the fireworks, washed over by the rest of the sensory waves: actual waves in the distance, the echoes of the explosions, cheering groups of devotees, an imaginable car outburst here and there. Whether in my imagination now or in their real-world parallels, none of these moments are going to last into the next one. They’re gone before you even have the chance to fully explore them.
I think perceptually, we base a lot on assumption, imagining from experience what the rest of the place or moment we’re in is actually like. But there’s a lot we just don’t see… though even if it’s through the lens of our reasoning, we get a sense of its reality.
And in the fireworks of our five senses, we find ourselves materially grounded – or, materially and neurologically overwhelmed, like there’s a tide washing over us – in the cascade of things we don’t actually see or just barely see but that nonetheless are, besides real in their own rights, real for us.
The paintings by Michele Abramowitz in a recent exhibition at Kate Werble Gallery in New York City chart the existential atmosphere where something real enough in its own orbit becomes real for us. Here, that second quality feels essential to the overall understanding of the original.
She was direct about going after this kind of thing. The show itself was called “These Intermediate Reals,” in reference (as I understand it) to the purgatorial reality of an image made into something familiarly full only by its perception.
Abramowitz’s paintings feature currents of abstract shapes, which are uniquely independent functionally but aware of each other. If I saw any of these painted forms in isolation, they’d bear the same sense of fullness as they do in the broader contexts of their overarching paintings, but they’re fluid in a manner that evokes relationship.
I could imagine the forms as moving and changing right in front of me, though they’re not actually doing that. But the whisper of real movement is there, a reflection of it on the perceptual window panes.
The formations remind me of the shapes of the biological world, but where I’m used to taking that organic environment as very fixed in its (eventual) form, these painted forms are just not. Somehow, I get the sense the imagery is even — eventually — slipping away, and it’ll last via the impression of its searching ambition it leaves behind instead of through its tactile specifics. The forms are full but distinctly limited.
I think of the relational aesthetics of something like a house that is highly used, really lived in, and when you’re standing in its midst or thinking back to it you get a sense of synchronicity in tandem with what’s so… temporary. The momentary movements that unfold there occupy – logistically and experientially – the same space, and in their gradual unfolding, something of what is before comes back in whatever is next.
Similarly, I was fascinated in the exhibition by the thought of Abramowitz’s visuals as constituting a continuum of maybe not space or internal meaning and substance but movement, all not quite seen in its imaginable entirety.
Imagine walking, right? Walking through an airport terminal, or walking down a busy sidewalk, or walking through your apartment or house. There’s a definition through all these movements that brings them together. And if you’re with or around other people in these places, your movements interact with and respond to the progressions of whoever is around you.
In Abramowitz’s exhibited artworks, the painted movements are all light, as though gliding across their underlying surfaces, and they’re all somewhat gentle in their approach, ample curvature in the forms.
I felt as though the paintings were fluctuating in their smallest of moments – and as though they did not just deny fixed specifics broadly but did, in fact, point to them someplace else… just not here. Here, instead, you find a haze of activated uncertainties, one perceptual moment leaning on the next across each painting – mingling with it just as much as it is moving away at the same time.
I didn’t get the sense that the forms, though internally machinated, were in a particular hurry to head any specific direction, though they insisted in their steady breadth on evoking the material. Yet, answering the question of specific, background place feels left to happenstance, as though the forms might as well be going any of a dozen ways and still hold on to the defining core that outlined them in the first place.
The imagery reminds me of the fireworks of color you might see if your vision is obscured or you’re just whipping by something too fast, like how colors blend together in expansive blurs when you’re in a car and looking out the window. The air of particularity to Abramowitz’s forms suggests there is something specific around here, but instead of explanation, sensation in these moments becomes the focus, or even the loss of it, strung together.
As mentioned, this exhibition is now closed. Thank you to the gallery, and best wishes to the artist. I really enjoyed these paintings!
