Dreamsong is pleased to announce Day After Day, the gallery’s inaugural solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based artist Rema Ghuloum (b. 1978, North Hollywood, CA). Comprised of six new abstract paintings and a series of the artist’s Rain drawings, the paintings in Day after Day frame layered and sanded veils of oil paint within thickly impastoed borders, transforming a series of discreet, meditative 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 surface tension and contrasting colors to evoke, hold and reconcile opposing sensations. A practitioner of Reiki healing and other meditative rituals, the artist’s approach to painting is similarly focused on process and presentness, favoring a series of prescribed actions in lieu of a predefined compositional goal.
Ghuloum begins each painting by pouring, spritzing and dripping a diluted acrylic ground onto canvasses propped horizontally on concrete blocks, tilting and manipulating their surfaces to draw out compositional guideposts. This playful, aqueous approach to underpainting contrasts with the artist’s subsequent use of dry or thinned oil paints, whose laborious application is guided by the emergence of small moments of tension within her paintings’ color and form. Two further steps complete the artist’s procedural mantra: the application at the end of the day of any paint left on the artist’s palette to the works’ edges; and the complete sanding down of their interior surfaces before beginning painting anew. Where the former step creates a kind of reference guide to the works’ materiality, the latter step signifies a lack of attachment to the previous day’s progress, while also embedding remnants of the oil paint more deeply in her canvasses and extending the temporal framework of their creation. This process of accrual and removal allow Ghuloum to create layers of paint that are built up and broken down over the course of months, focusing her attention on the depth and details of their ever-changing surfaces and turning their creation into a ritualized archaeology of transformation and erasure.
