Kamrooz Aram On Painting in the Space Between Grid and Gesture

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.

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 framework.”

For Aram, the framing line is essential and integral to the composition. “For me, it’s really about accepting that any so-called decorative line, any line that is meant to surround the composition, inevitably becomes part of the composition itself,” he argues. While his earlier works adhere more closely to this framework, the works on view in his gallery presentation more often move away from the grid, loosening their alignment while still retaining traces of organizing logic. Even when the grid fades, a form of structure continues to operate beneath the surface. “It comes from the muscle memory of having worked with the grid for so long that my body sort of remembers it,” he says, pushing back against the idea—often associated with Abstract Expressionism—that painting emerges as if from nowhere. To him, painting always comes from something, shaped by prior systems, gestures and accumulated ways of working that continue to inform the process, whether visibly or not.

For him, structure is not a constraint but a condition that enables other elements to emerge. “I also consider tile patterns to be a form of abstraction, and those are quite structured, right? So for me, the structure in the paintings actually allows the space for other things to happen,” he says, turning again to his musical analogy, referring to Persian music with its systems of modes, scales and compositional frameworks, or to jazz, where a fixed melody provides the basis for improvisation. “It’s very much like jazz. There’s improvisation that takes place: it will start in a certain way—it has the melody, the tune—and then each instrument takes turns improvising within that structure.”

Aram’s process remains suspended between intention and intuition. Within this inherited order, arcing shapes and continuous lines swirl, recalling ornamental and calligraphic traditions without resolving into a final identifiable pattern. “I think when one uses the word spiritual in reference to painting, maybe that’s the closest we can come to describing that presence the painting has—where it feels like it carries something that continues,” he argues. “It’s not necessarily resolved, it’s not perfect, but it has a kind of breath. It keeps unfolding.”

Aram intentionally plays with this ambiguity, suggesting and immediately defying a single cultural reference. His swirling, sinuous lines give rise to interrupted floral forms that one might describe as “arabesque.” Yet Aram challenges the cultural ambiguity, historical misunderstanding and misappropriation embedded in a generic term that has long collapsed very different traditions under a single “Arabic” label to which they might not belong. What interests him instead is how certain forms trigger these associations. “I think the forms are very vague—they might evoke certain things, certain pasts,” Aram reflects. “What’s interesting to me is how one identifies an “otherness” in forms—how a certain color or shape gets read as something exotic. When I use the term ‘arabesque,’ I use it in a very general and somewhat ironic way.”

In this sense, Aram’s work does not assert a fixed cultural identity but instead exposes the viewer’s own interpretive habits, revealing how easily visual languages are read through inherited frameworks shaped by enduring stereotypes and assumptions—making even an abstract composition never truly neutral.

As they unfold organically, these lines seem to respond to one of the most universal formal logics: the golden ratio, or divine proportion, shared across human-made creations and recurring structures of nature. “I’m looking for what I described as a kind of breath, or life,” Aram explains. While perfection remains unattainable, he seeks a state of near-resolution that sustains the viewer’s engagement beyond surface perception, operating on a deeper, more immersive level, as these forms approximate something familiar and universal, echoing timeless patterns of growth and transformation found in nature.

This open-endedness is also reflected in his process: some works accumulate over time, built through layers, pauses and returns in the studio, while others develop more fluidly, arriving in a thinner, more immediate form. At the same time, Aram’s paintings appear to exceed their own boundaries, not only as images but as presences that interact with their surroundings. “They turn into something that alters the architecture around it, that changes the feeling of the space, in the way that music does,” he points out.

This architectural dimension is something Aram has engaged with directly in his intervention at the Whitney Biennial. He designed the platform where his works are shown against a painted wall that brings the whole installation together as a cohesive painterly environment, dissolving the distinctions between artworks and display, ornament and artifact. “I’m very interested in architecture, and I tend to think of artworks—especially paintings, but also sculptures and object-based works—as a kind of architectural ornament,” Aram explains. “We tend to think of ornament as merely decorative, something secondary to fine art. But if we consider what ornament does in architecture, and what artworks do within architectural space, they function in very similar ways—especially if we allow ornament to have content, to be idea-based,” he adds, emphasizing that ornaments are never neutral but have always been vehicles of cultural significance.

Approached philosophically, he suggests that the idea of a “pure” painting collapses altogether. This informs his use of framing devices, which simultaneously contain and participate in the composition, sometimes holding the image in place and at other times allowing it to expand beyond its limits. Inside, his ceramic and sculptural works are presented within a deliberately museological setting, foregrounding how museum display, design and architecture shape the viewing experience and influence the production of meaning. “There’s really no such thing as a neutral space,” he argues. As in his paintings, framing devices do not simply contain the composition but actively participate in it, sometimes destabilizing their own function and establishing new dialectics of meaning. “You can expand that idea to the wall painting as a whole. The work exists on a wall—on this very specific pink wall—and if you move it to a white wall, it becomes something completely different, right?”

The walls themselves are not merely painted surfaces but a “monochromatic mural,” as he describes it, the result of an intensive material process developed through extensive experimentation in the studio, where layers of paint, fillers and underlying colors are tested repeatedly. “There are probably 40 layers of paint on my studio wall, just trying to get the right combination. What kind of paint, what kind of filler, what goes underneath. Because underneath that pink, there’s actually a kind of green-gray.”

The process he adopts here reveals a fundamental strategy underlying his entire practice: a continuous oscillation between sedimentation and erasure. Rather than simply building up an image, Aram constructs his paintings through cycles of drawing, covering, wiping and revealing, each work undergoing a geological process, shaped by successive events over time. Their surfaces often begin with a thick, almost plaster-like ground applied with a knife, creating a sense of accumulation. Yet much of what remains visible is the result of removal. “The texture you see here comes from the staining of oil crayon that’s been erased,” he points out as we look at the painterly fabric of Murmurations (2023). “All of that green, which looks almost like a plaster technique, is actually a very thin stain of washed-out oil crayon. It’s been wiped and then revealed through that process. So the image is built through erasure. The color is built through erasure.” What remains is a trace—something that persists through its partial disappearance, echoing what French philosopher Jacques Derrida described as the condition of presence itself: never fully given, always deferred, always in the process of becoming.

Color is clearly the most intuitive aspect of Aram’s practice, allowing the work to evolve in dialogue with its own internal logic and to find its final gradient through the different events it is subject to. “It emerges based on a feeling of what needs to be there. And that feeling has to be quite considered, even at an intuitive level,” he says. “It requires getting into a state of mind where I’m completely open to all possibilities.”

Although his abstract language resists direct biographical reading, Aram acknowledges that his process inevitably connects—consciously or not—to broader histories of loss, transformation and cultural persistence. He was born in Iran, a country shaped by cycles of upheaval and endurance. “It’s definitely personal, of course, but in a very abstract way. I’m not a narrative painter, so you don’t see a story,” he asserts, noting how this presence remains embodied in the painting—in the process, in its temporality and even in the patterns that emerge. “I think the idea—this myth of abstract expressionism—that painting can be completely self-referential, completely about nothing other than itself, is just that, a myth. As humans, we don’t experience things that way. There’s always a connection being made that contributes to the final interpretation and meaning.”

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