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Kamrooz Aram On Painting in the Space Between Grid and Gesture

With Observer, the artist reflects on why every act of painting, like every act of improvisation, needs something to push against.

Those in music know that within a score’s structure, there are infinite possibilities for variation and improvisation. With a past as a drummer and a deep knowledge of music, this sensibility may have informed, at least in part, artist Kamrooz Aram’s approach to abstraction. His works grapple with tension between organic lines and forms that flow fluidly across the canvas—within them is a desire to contain the entropic nature of all things within a framework.

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The Iranian-born artist has long interrogated the idea of abstraction as a purely Western modernist invention, engaging with its deeper indigeneity, which emerges in ornamental and decorative traditions and in repetitive patterns drawn from nature and developed across civilizations in the Middle East and beyond. His work directly challenges their labeling as “decorative,” insisting that these visual languages are not secondary to painting but rather ancestral and archetypal foundations from which modern abstraction more or less consciously drew.

In the works on view across his latest solo exhibition at Alexander Gray Associates and his presentation at the Whitney Biennial, Aram continues his decades-long project of reclaiming ornament’s dignity from Adolf Loos’s modernist dismissal, reasserting it as a spontaneous manifestation of a more universal and globally rooted search for shared, timeless forms. In this sense, the ornament embedded in Aram’s paintings re-emerges not as embellishment but as a form of cultural will—what Alois Riegl described as Kunstwollen—a historically embedded impulse that shapes how forms are produced, perceived and transmitted across time.

Aram’s approach to painting is deeply philosophical and anthropological; he investigates the most ancient impulse that led humans to begin tracing lines and, as Paul Klee once said, “take them for a walk.” He’s guided by a spontaneous, instinctive brain-hand connection that diverges from the ratio-based, modernist approach to abstraction, particularly geometric abstraction.

Yet Aram resists framing his practice as a simple opposition between structure and intuition or between formal rigor and a more spiritual or channeled approach. “I’m not sure that I would necessarily separate those things so clearly,” he tells Observer as we walk through “Infrequencies” at Alexander Gray Associates. Instead, he prefers to describe these elements as part of a causal relationship, where structure operates as a point of departure rather than a constraint. “It’s hard to make a direct connection or juxtaposition between something structural versus something loose and a spiritual approach, or a spiritual understanding of painting. Maybe it’s more of a cause-and-effect relationship. I think of it almost like a musical time signature. So the grid, for example, creates a........

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