Each of Kemar Keanu Wynter’s paintings is an urgent compression of color. Wynter applies oil pastel in lines that swirl and smear across the paper, so that his compositions are bound by the density of their own centers rather than any external structure or gravity. An entire language of marks seems to unfurl and come back into focus.

The work’s sense of urgency comes from the grid of cardstock underneath the thick pigment—a substrate that is malleable and modular, as if each successive sheet was added as the painting morphed and expanded. Fields of color skip and blur across those paper borders, and the underlying grid is often off-kilter and misaligned: more evidence that form was subsumed by process, that the whorl is not what is being described but the shape that describing takes. Read More