FRAN SHALOM : CATALOGUES : 2025 Catalogue

Fran Shalom: Everyday Improvisations

FRAN SHALOM: IMPROVISATION AS PROCESS

Essay by Jason Stopa

The second chapter of How to See by David Salle begins with a few rhetorical devices. He writes, “What makes a picture? Is every painting pictorial, or is it a quality only some paintings possess? The answer rests on how forcefully a painting evokes the strangeness of the visual world, and the arrangements that have to be in place for something to be pictured — the interconnectedness of the image-source, the rectangle, and the manner in which the paint comes to rest on the canvas.” We could add: a successful painting establishes the terms for visual experience. Fran Shalom, who has been exhibiting since the late 1980s, makes modest-sized abstract paintings full of idiosyncratic decision making and irreverent playfulness. Her practice is wedded to improvisation, she uses no preset palette, does no preliminary research, and no prior sketches or studies inform her paintings. She begins by laying down a color or shape and the rest is a call and response. Yet, the artist operates within a tight vocabulary as dirty, saturated color frequently describes large circular forms resembling heads, screens, and totems pulsating with linear clarity and Pop-inflected drama.

Shalom completed her MFA at the Art Institute in San Francisco as a photographer, and for years lugged around a Hasselblad, which has a 2 ¼ by 2 ¼ frame. Naturally, the artist fell in love with the square. When she shifted to painting, there was a built in familiarity with the square format, and all of its attendant baggage. Shalom is a self-described Modernist painter. She is not, however, interested in the concerns of Non-Objective abstraction, but instead leans into referentiality. The artist has also long maintained a Zen Buddhist practice, which places considerable emphasis on change, flexibility, direct experience and rejects a fixed approach to things; qualities readily apparent in her paintings. J.J. Murphy has previously written about the formal relationship between the late Thomas Nozkowski and Fran Shalom, as they both share a penchant for modest easel-sized work and cartoon-like formal invention. Another likely painterly bedfellow is Brenda Goodman. Both artists have been described as painters’ painters, as each employs transparent veils of color that alternate with sharp, linear geometric form, and materially dense passages to create deeply psychological worlds. Yet, while the materiality of Goodman’s paintings evoke psychological grief and bodily vulnerability; Shalom’s paintings are decidedly character-like, and her forms are biomorphic as opposed to geometric. Nearly all of her works read as abstract self-portraits portraying one’s changing attitude and identity within a complex emotional spectrum.

Fran Shalom, Forgetting the Self, 2025, oil on canvas, 24 x 24 in.

While I had been familiar with Fran Shalom’s work in the past, a recent summer visit to her studio in Jersey City revealed a certain continuity behind her improvisation. A number of recent 2024 paintings like Double Take, Dance Yourself Clean, and Forgetting the Self, all use variants of red, orange, magenta or pink as a dominant color assigned to a central form on an off-square substrate. Here, Shalom’s color is found, matte and expansive. There is a sharp dynamism to Double Take, which features a large red curvilinear central form with swirling appendages, offset by a bright yellow drop shadow that cuts out the surrounding negative space. Forgetting the Self contains a dirty magenta biomorphic, head-like form propped up by a phthalo blue grooved neck, framed by a white negative space. It is strange, mysterious and highly evocative. All three paintings emphasize their history. Successive layers of paint create muted passages, which at times, expose transparent underpaintings that act as visual breadcrumbs walking the viewer through labor, time, and decision making.

In thinking about these works, I’m inclined to counter another set of questions. What role can intuition play in abstract painting in the wake of Abstract Expressionism? Is abstraction always self-referential? And, if so, what self is being referenced? Modernist painting took up the task of self-definition, and it did so by asking itself empirical questions. Questions that were essential to its physical makeup. A few things turned up: intentionally, chance and improvisation. These three distinct modalities would appear throughout the 20th century again and again.

A notable example of chance operations is Jean Arp’s paper collage works where he famously tore paper into pieces, and after letting them flutter to the floor, he then pasted it onto a substrate in the pattern they happened to fall. Willem DeKooning’s paintings fused together the psychic automatism of the Surrealists with a gestural lyricism, editing and adding passages, he often wiped away paint to reveal underpaintings, eventually arriving at an exuberant materialism. And, of course, there is the intentionality of Minimalists like Donald Judd, whose use of industrial materials and insistence on whole, basic shapes resulted in works that stacked or progressed as sequences in mathematical arrangements. Shalom is not a process painter, nor is she concerned with theories of intent. The artist doesn’t emphasize chance operations and the elimination of one’s aesthetic choices. Abstract Expressionism, with its desire for humanism, the sublime and transcendence on a grand scale, is too heroic for Shalom. Hers is an artistic practice where intentionality operates by way of improvisation and intuition. Nothing is preplanned. Yet, the discovery of the right form, color, or composition is crystallized in the very moment of its fruition. It is a process not unlike jazz, one where knowledge and experience provides a musician the opportunity to be intentional as they riff in a given direction.

Intuition in the hands of Shalom is more than just a knee-jerk response, which can churn out rather obvious, repetitive paintings. Rather, intuition is a knowledge-based internal process whereby prior decisions are internalized, and then made available in real time, an open-ended process that the artist has honed for many years. At a moment when artists are highly keyed into trends, intuition can operate as a device to eschew perfectionism, personal branding and even irony. The artist states, “there are a number of paintings underneath the final painting that show that there is a history, that it’s not perfect. I don’t want perfect.” Shalom isn’t after a grand project.

That her work mirrors her meditation practice may come as no surprise. These are paintings that serve as a way to organize one’s thoughts, to examine the nature of one’s identity, and to open up potential avenues for visual discovery.

Jason Stopa, 2025