Day After Dayby Rema Ghuloum

Dreamsong is pleased to present Day after Day, the gallery’s inaugural solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based artist Rema Ghuloum (b. 1978, North Hollywood, CA). Featuring seven new paintings, the works in Day after Day frame layered and sanded veils of oil paint within multihued, impastoed borders, transforming a series of discrete, contemplative gestures into contrasting plays of light, shadow and color that unfold with the sublime depth of landscape. Emphasizing the physicality of feeling and emotion, Ghuloum uses compositional tension and contrasting colors to evoke, hold and reconcile opposing sensations.

A longtime practitioner of Reiki healing, Ghuloum has relied on meditative practices to confront recent tragedies, both personal and political. Applying this ethos to her painting practice, the artist aims to be fully present over the course of a long process, forcing herself to sit with and absorb conflicting and uncomfortable sentiments. By eschewing a predefined compositional vision in favor of a series of prescribed actions, Ghuloum relies on process to synthesize contrasting ideas – grief and love, pain and beauty – within each work.

Ghuloum begins each painting by pouring, spritzing and dripping acryla-gouache ground onto horizontally propped canvases, tilting and manipulating their surfaces until structural guideposts begin to emerge. This playful, aqueous approach to underpainting contrasts with her subsequent application of dry and thinned oil paints, which is guided by the search for small moments of tension within fields of color and elements of form. Two further steps complete Ghuloum’s procedural regimen at the end of the day: daubing any paint left on her palette onto the edges of each painting and completely sanding down the interior surfaces before beginning painting anew the following day. Where Ghuloum’s thickly applied edges frame her paintings, adding depth and acting as a kind of reference guide to their materiality, the accrual and removal of interior paint embeds the oil more deeply into the canvas, resulting in layers of paint that are built up and broken down repeatedly over the course of months. By ritualizing her process, Ghuloum treats painting as a meditative act, engaging in an archaeology of transformation and erasure, and creating the emotional and temporal space needed to convey a depth of material and feeling.

In titling each of the six small paintings in Day after Day ‘Façade’ (followed by a unique descriptor), the artist embraces the word’s dual meaning, referencing both the manner in which light and shadow shape architectural exteriors as well as the term’s allusion to a pretense or affectation that conceals actual depth. Specifically, these small paintings reference Claude Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series, both in their ethereality and in the manner in which color, light and shadow shift across vertically oriented compositions from one painting to the next. In ‘Façade (2am)’ curtains of purple, yellow, orange and green drape down onto a shadowed plane that – in a trompe l’oeil gesture – appears to be cast by the painting’s thickly bordered bottom edge. Interrupted mid-composition by a meandering horizontal band, the surface breaks into pixelated blocks of color that shimmer towards the foreground like a mirage. Day after Day’s only large-scale painting, Awakening, also differs in the horizontal orientation of its gestural marks. Viewed top to bottom, a tripartite structure maintains the proportions of a vista, with a scrim of orange hanging over purple shadowed hills. This continuity is broken in Awakening’s bottom third, where land dissolves into something less solid – water or smoke – and the foreground is absorbed into the background; the cycle of viewing and feeling the work begins anew.

About the artist

Rema Ghuloum received an MFA from California College of the Arts and has exhibited throughout the US and internationally, with recent solo exhibitions at Philip Martin Gallery (Los Angeles), DeBoer Gallery (Antwerp), Sargent’s Daughters (New York), Emma Gray HQ (Los Angeles) and Et al. (San Francisco). Ghuloum’s work has been included in recent group exhibitions at the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art (Rancho Cucamonga, CA), Forest Lawn Museum (Glendale, CA), Taymour Grahne Projects (London), Nathalie Karg, (New York), Baik Art (Seoul), Mother Gallery (Beacon, NY), Long Beach Museum of Art (Long Beach, CA), Make Room (Los Angeles) and Meyer Reigger (Berlin) among many other venues

Rema Ghuloum’s exhibition Atmospheres was reviewed in the January 2025 issue of Artforum. Her work has also been featured in numerous other publications including CARLA, LA Weekly, Hyperallergic and the LA Times. Awards include the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Joan Mitchell Center Residency, Adolf & Esther Gottlieb Foundation Emergency Grant, Vermont Studio Center Residency and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, among others.