The Art of Living Slowly: Marina Adams

The paintings of Marina Adams are full of breath. They deepen, broaden, and stretch out, prompting the same response in body and mind – offering a reorientation, a recalibration. The Art of Living Slowly, Adams’ second solo exhibition with Galerie Thomas Schulte, presents new small- to medium-scale paintings and works on paper that continue building on her rich visual language with nuance and quiet intent. The integration of color, line and form sets a dynamic that hovers between dreaminess and vibrant actuality, at the edge of emergence and the sheer energy that these elements carry in and of themselves.

Links formed between paintings are rooted in a common organizing structure that repeatedly drifts into the unknown. The small-scale works share titles that reflect visual threads running through – distinct correspondences of direction and form. The SongLines paintings, for example, are composed of a certain degree of symmetry and wavering geometry, with stacked and interwoven forms that are roughly quadrilateral or triangular. Their title suggests the lines of a song, as well as the rhythms and contours embodied by line itself. Songlines, in the mythology of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, are also paths that cross land, navigated by reciting songs in which its natural features are described. Complex systems of knowledge are stored and transported in the shape of a melody that transcends geography and language. In these paintings, connections are forged through intersection: lines criss-cross and colors interlock. At times sharp in contrast and at others subtle in their differences, neighboring color regions attain their own clarity, while set in harmony with one another. Terrains are mapped in a common ground, where each is a threshold to the next.

The larger works featured here formally inhabit a space in between. Their titles offer navigational cues, proposing a fluctuating relation to the natural environment. In Riding the Waves, the angularity of color and line is further softened. Its color palette, with sandy ochres, deep reds, varying blues, and subdued lime greens, is similar to Under the Ionian Sea. In the latter, lines become submerged and corners and juxtapositions give way to layering – establishing a particularly liminal space, as though between breaths. Visible beneath a red swathe, faint outlines pointing towards the top of the painting give continuity to an ochre field that’s both rounded and pointed, grazing the painting’s bottom edge. The positioning of over and under gets upended, as waves flow horizontally across the surface, allowing unobstructed passage from one side to the other.

This motion is both retained and reoriented in East of the Sun, which picks up on the yellows centrally positioned in the two aforementioned paintings and extends it, flooding through its core with a suitably luminous shade. The central form echoes those in the more geometric compositions, with a column-like body of dips and swells. Even with crisper edges and greater solidity, the form loosens here, becoming more continuous – reminiscent of a pump or funnel, a vessel with the ability to transport multitudes. Brown and red radiate outward from it in vertical waves, ebbing into starker color contrasts at the periphery. Here, the relationship between colors is one of parallels, rather than intersections.

Form and color behave in a similar way in the small-scale Actualities paintings, which ease into greater translucence, full of overlaps and slippages. In predominantly vertical, curving movements on square canvases, the core’s presence is more fluid, shifted by currents that ripple and recede. At times, a porous frame around the outside weaves into outlines of the color fields within: not acting as a boundary, but as a connective element, joining everything it touches.

The same holds true of line in the works on paper – which include pencil drawings, watercolor, and layerings of media and erasures. They conjure trees: less as form and more as living, pulsating systems with a reciprocal relationship to their surroundings. Like the paintings, there is a steadiness and all-encompassing quality to how they unfold: here, through largely curving, looping lines that are entangled and almost continuous. Their surfaces buzz, grounded yet weightless. Branches like lungs pump and circulate, opening channels to rounded chambers like a heart. These are not closed systems, but interdependent ones.

It’s the life force of all things that Adams is interested in. Through gestures of connection, lines resonate and colors open up on an elemental level – giving shape to meaning that is unmediated, reaching us at our core. In The Art of Living Slowly, porousness is suggested: the space of life flows into art, and vice versa. To meet this multidirectional, sustained momentum, we’re reminded, means slowing down, and slowing down takes practice. Attuning to rhythms – to patterns of movement – involves listening, observation, presence. These are motions that are embodied, and which can hold radical potential for alternative ways – of sensing, of existing – instilled with the power simply to be.

Text by Julianne Cordray