Brooklin A. Soumahoro: Fifteen Measures

François Ghebaly New York is proud to present Fifteen Measures, Brooklin Soumahoro’s newest exhibition at the gallery’s Lower East Side location. 

Los Angeles-based painter Brooklin A. Soumahoro treats color theory as both careful science and intuitive process. He achieves extraordinary technical precision in his work, incorporating rigorous chromatic and geometric study while maintaining the sensitivity of painterly elements like visible brushwork and contrastive underlayers. His process involves translating sonic frequencies, musical rhythms, and other inspirations into compositions that fuse intricate patterning with vibrant, transportative color fields. Drawing from sources like landscape and observational study, material cultures, and wider 20th century art histories, Soumahoro transforms his research into luminous painted surfaces that integrate scores of carefully calibrated color relationships.

Soumahoro’s latest exhibition Fifteen Measures extends the artist’s ongoing interest in visual and rhythmic structures. As the title suggests, his newest work looks toward “odd” numbers, asymmetries, polyrhythms, and nonobvious formal or chromatic combinations for their unique harmonies and unexpected senses of balance. Unlike the popular 4-, 8-, or 16-bar phrase in music composition, Fifteen Measures embraces the beauty and potential in irregular intervals, creating unique visual counterpoint through off-kilter proportions and pairings. In this sense, the exhibition represents a reimagination of familiar subject matter, as Soumahoro transposes his signature “window” forms across slanting grids and unexpected lines of reflection.

Against a sequence of polychrome painted walls, the exhibition comprises fifteen framed works installed throughout the gallery space, each at a tight, study-like scale. Works like Window, Orn/Prl.1.25 and sp.Window, Org/Ble.1.25 see Soumahoro map gradated color pairings onto tilted, unpredictable geometric arrays, filtering familiar touchstones in Op art, French Modernist painting, and patterning traditions through the artist’s distinctive vocabulary. The paintings in Fifteen Measures resonate with a visual and sensory cadence that’s syncopated, jazz-like, and almost improvisational. For Soumahoro, the exhibition’s focus on small formats lends itself uniquely to this, allowing for study and experimentation while emphasizing new kinds of close-looking for both artist and viewer. The resulting body of work offers encounters with color, form, and rhythm that are at once intimate and expansive, pointing toward new dialogues in the artist’s prismatic, uncompromising practice.

Brooklin A. Soumahoro (b. 1990, Paris, France) lives and works in Los Angeles. Selected solo and group exhibitions include François Ghebaly, Los Angeles; rodolphe janssen, Brussels; Barbati Gallery, Venice; Sunday-S Gallery, Copenhagen; Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago; The Pit, Los Angeles; and Massimo De Carlo V-Space.