Abraham Cone (b. 1998, MI) works out of the poetic tension between the ground of painting and the ground under his feet, moving conceptually and physically between floor and wall. Human touch is channeled into canvas through intimate caresses of brush. Abraham besets forms in pattern, and figures lightly graze one another amidst synchronized movement. Materials are often gathered through gift economies, becoming works which are more than the sum of their parts. Image-making is Abraham’s conduit for joining people with places in reciprocity—conjuring relational space through pictorial space.

Familial relations with land by way of farming beget Abraham’s interest in agrarian rituals. Fields, woods, and lakes are sites for solitude, platonic fellowship, and homoerotic encounter: in life as in image. Color becomes permeable by way of optical-mixing, softly melding figure with ground in luminosity. Large-format paintings produce more than optical encounters: physical encounters. Abraham vaporously builds atmosphere layer upon layer with soft gestures according to his heart.

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