Good abstraction requires a basic element: absolute command and awareness of the body. Typically, abstraction is shaped by the complex interaction of physical and psychological actions, in which movement and sensation are transformed onto the canvas through intuitive color flow and unsuppressed markings.
Another key factor is finding harmony and balance in seemingly chaotic accumulation and layering of painting gestures, a turbulent process that follows the artist’s inner world and sensory response. In this way, the function of a powerful abstract painting is like a carefully constructed music where the sounds, movements and pauses are carefully balanced. Like musical composition, abstraction becomes a way to navigate and understand intangible spaces—a seamless combination of the importance of our feelings with the symbolicity of emotion and mnemonic responses, existing before linguistic or codified interpretations.
Lindsay Adams’ vibrant abstract precision exists at this intersection where deep physical and lyrical responses to reality are developing. Her work negotiates the relationship between the self and the surrounding environment, thus forming the possibility of emotions, feelings and infinite expressions found in this confined space. “Abstract is both a language and a way of thinking, a way that allows me to interact with possibilities rather than certainty,” the artist said of the opening of Solo’s debut with Sean Kelly Gallery in this year’s Frieze Los Angeles. “To me, abstraction is not meaningless; it is more like a tool for expanding meetings, as intuition, ambiguousness and feeling.”
Fluctuating in a ventilated, evaporated atmosphere, the calibrated color appears as if it can extend infinitely, unfolding in a harmonious sequence, moving at its own internal rhythm, a rhythm of repetition and continuous change. Her goal is to create a dynamic and open abstract field that invites viewers to wander, drift and surrender to the canvas activation feeling and suggestions. This concept also provides the title of “Let your miracle move” for the exhibition. The phrase was originally taken from a sentence written by the poet Patricia Spears Jones to the philosopher Audre Lorde, which encapsulates Adams’ ability to construct parallel sensory dimensions and evoke the entire world, allowing the audience to freely navigate the multiple possibilities of imagination, her paintings unlocked: “Abstract is connected with freedom and freedom; it allows gestures to have both historical and futuristic nature, and can immediately exist multiple reality.”
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In her latest work, the Chicago-based artist’s abstract approach is more liberating and smoother than in previous years. Adams, freed from the need to bind her abstraction to the natural world, abandoned the floral references of her early works altogether, turning the painted surface into an open, ever-changing feeling. “Abstract is closely related to freedom and liberation; it allows multiple realities to exist at once to allow gestures to have both historical and futuristic nature,” she explains. “When I think about how my work develops, meeting at the intersection of representation and abstraction, I thank this for allowing me to latitude.”
Like a harmonic advancement, Adams’ rhythmic colors are adorned with vivid tones, introducing changes and contrasts, floating over a more uniform evaporating atmosphere, as if they were dangerously higher pitch reflections of the glittering on the liquid surface or the sudden burst of higher-pitched reflections from higher-pitched species of Saxony or Saxony species, creating a more dynamic experience.
This analogy is deeply aware of by Adams, whose process “moves between spontaneity and control, like improvisational music – rhythm, repetition and silence play a role.” She believes that intuitive markup production is an embodied behavior that has the weight of memory, movement and emotion. “At the same time, my paintings are musical – the function of determining markers, such as folding, colors create harmony and tension, and space both pauses and breathes.”
In her work, rhythm emerges from a continuous conversation with the canvas, a back and forth process in the universe she is creating, and in the organic growth of color and space suggestions she gradually enters the universe she creates. “My process is rooted in response – every marker, cleaning or layer is built on things that have been before, having a conversation between intention and discovery,” she said.
Calibrate movements with moments of silence, repetition and change, intuition and control, artists negotiate ongoing negotiations between the physical presence, emotional responses and canvas. “My body is always negotiating, responding to scale, texture and resistance,” she said. In this sense, although completely abstract words are vocabulary, Adams’ paintings inevitably have political implications because they prompt us to consider how the body and mind react, navigate or surrender to the process of ambiguity, just like our inner meaning, they interact with us, and those processes interact with us inwardly.
Adams’s abstract canvas is a space for artists and audiences to discover. The canvas becomes a website for training awareness, the perception and existence of people in the world, how they deal with experience and how they translate and express it in and out of language. “The balance between instinct and intentionality reflects how we structure and improvise the way we create in rhythm.”
Lindsay Adams’ “Stay Miracle Continue” in Los Angeles continues until March 8, 2025.
