SAMUEL JABLON – LIFE IS FINE
2016-04-11Jablon is at once a poet, painter and performance artist; a hybrid. His paintings are vibrant renderings of words abstracted, a kind of visual manifestation of poetry. He appropriates found language — overheard words and familiar phrases, lines of poetry and offhand comments — and transmutes them into compositions. Language disintegrates into letters, which dissolve into line, shape and color.
While, at first glance, the paintings’ textual content often appears legible, this effect reveals itself to be a deception. The paintings demand close consideration and a highly specific mode of looking, one that is neither quite reading nor seeing. As Jablon works, meanings and content metamorphose, other words appear, and differing combinations of layered paint, broken structures, mirrors and pieces of glass confound the possibility of a clean read. Language, in this body of work, appears in a new, deeply transformed light—one that shifts with the viewer’s experience and perception of the words.
The title, Life is Fine, is borrowed from a poem by Langston Hughes. Like the poem, the paintings navigate a messy, ambiguous line that separates the positive and negative experiences of life. Jablon includes the phrase “what a beautiful time” in a number of paintings, and its repetition becomes a type of mantra, as if one must convince oneself that life is indeed fine.
Opposite – Destiny, 2016
Exhibition runs through till May 15th, 2016
Freight + Volume
97 Allen Street
New York
NY 10002
