Each of the eleven oil paintings in this show, Enzo Shalom’s first with Bortolami, appeared tantalizingly singular. Installed in the upstairs gallery, the works were immediately individuated by their formats: Most were vertical, yet no two shared the same dimensions or proportions. The grouping also included both a square and a markedly horizontal support. The works’ sense of physical specificity was further enhanced by their disparate substrates, ranging from canvas and linen to paper, jute, and wood panel. The imagery, too, was surprisingly varied, evoking diverse references such as Cubist still life, a drapery study, and Japanese landscape painting. Yet the works linked to one another in manifold ways—formally, chromatically, and in terms of process. Far from an incidental feature, that rhizomatic quality appeared to be part of the paintings’ subject.
The notably succinct press release for Shalom’s prior solo show, held at New York gallery Jenny’s in 2021, identified frottage—the Surrealist technique, famously developed by Max Ernst in the 1920s, of rubbing a support with a graphic implement to reveal the texture of an underlying object or surface—as a “baseline” for the works he showed on that occasion. The paintings at Bortolami, all Untitled and completed in 2024, indicated the ongoing relevance of this procedure. A handful of the compositions incorporated it directly: One witnessed the rubbings of what looked like washers in a painting on paper, or the serpentine traces of a slender cord among the collaged paper fragments affixed to a work on canvas. More generally, however, that method offered a kind of conceptual model. Frottage, after all, assumes the mutual porousness of the literal and the metaphorical, of indexes and images; it distills the essentially interpretive or indeed projective disposition of human seeing in a particularly powerful way. These evocative paintings, primarily built up through innumerable layers of semi-opaque oil paint and riddled with pentimenti, engaged a similar slippage, at once inviting and eluding exegesis. Eschewing narrative closure, Shalom seemed more interested in letting associations ramify, converge, and fork anew.
Many of the paintings possessed an emergent quality, with intimations of things floating just beneath the surface and fished up to the picture plane. In perhaps the most subtle instance, a nearly monochromatic slate-gray work installed opposite the gallery entrance slowly revealed multiple orders of heteroclite marks, some of them barely discernible, while others seemed more conducive to touch rather than sight. Hairbreadth ridges and sketchy lines formed repeating squares, pentagons, and hexagons; these elements appeared over or under or exactly adjacent to a further array of daubs, touches, patches, and lines, some of which implied three-dimensional recession. The whole suggested now a floor, now a wall, now an opening onto indefinite atmospheric space.
Shalom’s refusal of univocity found emblematic expression in the many branching structures within his paintings, from the suggested foliage in the lone horizontal format and the depicted folds of the work on jute to the wavering lines on the square support, executed primarily in shades of taupe. (This last scaffolding, which included several triangular and diamond-shaped voids, read almost as a disarticulated version of the irregular harlequin motif in yet another composition installed on an adjacent wall.) Especially suggestive were two vertical paintings—one, with horizontal tiers of dusty rose and cream, in oil on linen; the other, an oil on canvas that was slightly larger and predominantly rendered in shades of tan—installed at opposite ends of the gallery. Both incorporated the same reticulated structure: a serial march of rectangles above a passage of herringbone pattern, vaguely reminiscent of a fragment of parquet floor. Shalom had thickened a line in one instance, attenuated or eliminated it in the other; he had paired the lattice with a diagrammatic suggestion of a corner of a room here, veiled its lower extremities there. The resulting works registered less as serial iterations than as, say, independent siblings. In neither instance, however, did the configuration lose its recalcitrant strangeness. Hovering at the threshold of recognition, it held space for obscurity.
