October 23rd - November 22nd

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A Little Song in the DarkDeleuze and Guattari begin their discussion of the refrain with a child singing in the dark. The darkness remains, but the song changes its organization. Rhythm draws a temporary boundary through an otherwise undifferentiated space. The refrain is not an escape from disorder; it is an act of construction within it.

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Kevin Glass’s recent paintings operate through a similar logic. They build systems and then allow those systems to become unstable. Circles collect into rows, constellations, membranes and fields. They resemble counting, tapping, prayers whispered over rosary beads, cells, scales, coins, eyes: forms whose recurrence gives the surface a temporary coherence without ever fixing its meaning. Every mark is materially distinct; repetition cannot reproduce sameness. One form thickens while another collapses, edges bleed into one another or disappear beneath subsequent layers. Difference enters through the attempt to repeat. Elsewhere, no recurring unit is necessary. Marks gather, disperse, accumulate, or press themselves around fields of open ground. A pale opening can exert as much force as the paint

surrounding it. Density gives way to vacancy; pattern becomes mass; what first appears chaotic suddenly discloses an internal logic. The paintings continually shift the terms by which they can be read.

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Glass’s surfaces are violently haptic. Paint crusts, drags, pools and catches. Color accumulates in strata, is buried, eroded, and exposed again. Earlier decisions persist beneath later ones like sediment, never fully disappearing from the surface they helped produce. The painting carries the

history of its own making as a landscape carries the record of pressure, deposition and disturbance. The eye is continually asked to change its mind.

This places the work at some distance from the familiar mythology of abstraction as the direct transcription of an inner life. Its material intensity is not simply evidence of feeling, nor does every mark announce the spontaneous presence of the artist. Glass works through repetition,

accumulation, covering, scraping, interruption and return. Control produces accidents; accidents suggest new structures. The paintings do not simply come out of the psyche. They stage a negotiation with it, allowing form to emerge through the encounter between intention and

everything that exceeds it.