Sam Friedman - Territories Unexplored

Territories Unexplored - Essay by Mónica Ramírez-Montagut  - PDF Download

Sam Friedman - Selected Works - Artist Page

Gallery Geranmayeh is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of works by NewYork based artist, Sam Friedman.

Friedman’s paintings are portals to other-worldly landscapes, like the impression of that one landscape he remembers seeing for the first time: 

“When I was little, one of the earliest drawings I remember was from the husband of my elementary school librarian. He drew ink drawings from nature. He did one with these super thick dark trees that framed the view off to the distance in a way that you thought you were on a mountain looking out from a little vista spot. That image stuck with me for years”.   

One could argue that Friedman explores the thick tree framing strategy that impressed him as a youngster by taking the exercise to its utmost consequence: his is an extreme framing. Comprised of a series of layers or planes that function like those trees embracing a view, Friedman develops a method based on a multiplicity of layers that become close and closer to the viewer, and they frame a far off vista with more frames or layers that place the viewer far and farther. 

The viewer is presented with elements from nature such as water, sand, sky, clouds, sun, rain, that he submits to an abstraction process and then renders them as thin curving series of blue and green lines, brown circular spots, horizontal bluish gradations, wiggly thick sinuous shapes, red circles, or series of diagonal or vertical stacked lines. The recurrent visual vocabulary provides us, the viewer, with some tools to identify a landscape and yet, as we know, the paintings reveal many elements that do not have such a direct reference. Ultimately, the back and forth of the gaze through the multiple frames is enhanced by the back and forth between representation and abstraction simultaneously present in Friedman’s work. These paintings reveal some information while simultaneously resisting a thorough interpretation of them.