Brooklin A. Soumahoro: Let There Be

What worlds do Brooklin A. Soumahoro’s Windows open onto? From the first glance, the geometric abstractions gathered in this exhibition invite an experience that is at once optical and chromatic. Each canvas grows out of a complex arrangement of repeated and combined triangular motifs, following a system of its own: the triangle is the basic unit, the module from which the entire composition is built. This structure is the fruit of extensive preparatory work. In pencil, Soumahoro constructs geometric frameworks, adjusting their proportions through precise mathematical calculation before exploring the many ways they can be combined. Yet out of this rigorous discipline comes a state of instability that the artist calls “perfect unbalance”. The experience of his painting truly begins at the point where the most rigorous order seems to tip into instability. The eye no longer travels across the surface; it crosses a threshold and plunges into depth. Converging lines and the repetition of the motif expand the pictorial space, while contrasts of colour heighten the intensity of the encounter. Here the poetics of instability finds its fullest expression: colour and form begin to move. Seen from a distance, each painting appears perfectly symmetrical, but closer attention to certain details – very slight disruptions in the repetition of forms – reveals its irregularities. Geometry ceases to be a principle of stability and becomes an instrument of perceptual disturbance. The paintings also follow a dual logic, both centrifugal and centripetal. While the composition seems to spread beyond its own edges, the arrangement of forms around a central point pulls the gaze in the opposite direction. Space contracts and opens into depth, becoming an abyss, as if the painting were trying to break free of the authority of the surface. This vertiginous kaleidoscope keeps the image oscillating between different spatial configurations in search of a fourth dimension, recalling the American artists of the Park Place Gallery group (1962–67), who sought in their work a cosmos modelled on Einstein’s theory. Soumahoro associates each colour with a musical note, turning these compositions of remarkable chromatic depth into pictorial symphonies. They call to mind the Star Gate sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a chromatic epiphany set to the music of György Ligeti, which makes the orchestra shimmer with iridescent colour. If Soumahoro’s painting plays with space, it also plays with time. Its appearance changes with the viewer’s distance, and it never reveals itself in a single glance. The full complexity of its colour emerges only through an active experience involving the movement of the eye and the body, and the time spent looking. Up close, another pictorial system emerges. From afar, the geometric composition reads as a pure image; nearer, its materiality gradually comes to the fore. Thousands of strokes, made with two brushes roughly one to three millimetres wide, become visible on the canvas, and the painting reveals itself through the traces of its making. Gesture does not contradict the system – it is the material condition that makes the system possible. The painting refuses to choose between system and gesture, image and matter, surface and depth, holding them instead in dynamic tension, and this is precisely how Soumahoro renews the legacy of geometric abstraction. Geometry no longer simply organises the composition; it produces an instability that unfolds in time and space in response to the movement of the body. At the same time, the materiality of the painting does not dissolve its geometric rigour but intensifies its perceptual effects. Through this distinctive coexistence of calculation and gesture, the Windows reinvent the possibilities of abstraction. They ask to be seen with the whole body, revealing their full potential only through the viewer’s kinaesthetic experience. As the art historian Alexander Alberro has put it, the more artworks act on the spectator’s nervous system, the more egalitarian they are. Soumahoro’s Windows open onto a shared space of experience, yet its intensity remains unique to each viewer. The title, Let There Be, thus reads as the programme of the painting itself: to allow, at the heart of the most rigorous system, for the possibility of that system exceeding its own limits. It is within this powerful tension – this “perfect unbalance” between order and disorder, rigour and perceptual blur – that Soumahoro decisively shifts the coordinates of geometric abstraction.