Interviews, Online Exclusive

Kamrooz Aram

Accumulated Marks

Words PLUS MAGAZINE

Photography JAE KIM

Kamrooz Aram works on a painting until it feels ready to exist on its own. He layers gesso, draws, wipes, and returns, letting the lines settle slowly. The paintings now on view at Alexander Gray Associates span six years of patient attention, each surface holding the memory of its making. In the following conversation, Aram talks about where the paintings begin and what it means to work against modernism’s long-standing suspicion of the decorative, not by dismantling it through argument, but by simply making it feel beside the point.

PLUS MAGAZINE: I want to start somewhere before the work we’re here to talk about, before painting was even part of the picture. Before painting became part of your life, what were you drawn to, and how did that change?

KAMROOZ ARAM: Before I started painting, I had other creative outlets like writing and music. As an ESL student in the United States, I became very proficient in English, and writing came naturally to me. I sometimes wonder if that’s connected to learning the language at eight years old, almost like learning to play a musical instrument at a young age. I started playing drums when I was about 12, and that became my identity throughout my teenage years. My dream was to be a musician. I recently read Patti Smith’s memoir, in which she talks about recognizing the difference between a dream and a calling. This distinction was striking to me. Music was a dream for me, but I guess painting turned out to be the calling.

I made my first painting quite randomly when I was around 17. I bought a set of acrylic paints and painted on paper. I immediately connected with the material, dragging one color over another and finding a depth in that layering. Something in that process felt very emotional to me. I took it to my high school art teacher, and he looked at it for a while without saying anything. Then he said gently, ‘We have to get you painting.’ He made the space for me, coached me, and encouraged me until I became obsessed with it. To find something you do well and that people recognize, at that age, at that particularly difficult time of becoming, is invaluable.

P: That experience of finding something that needed time to develop seems to have stayed with you. Seeing the exhibition at Alexander Gray Associates, and knowing these paintings span six years without any rush, you can feel that patience in them. What was it like to finally show them?

KA: I made these particular paintings intermittently between 2020 and 2026, and each painting was given ample time to develop: to be left alone, returned to, and reworked. They are not a series — and there’s no seriality, even though they have strong relationships to one another. They are autonomous, individual paintings installed in the gallery without wall-painting or exhibition design; something I haven’t done in a while.

My studio has always been very private. I like to allow the work to become itself without pressure. Once I think I’ve arrived at some kind of resolution, I need to let it sit, to be sure it doesn’t require anything else from me. Two weeks is typically the right amount of time for me to sit with a painting and let it breathe. With these paintings, however, I allowed them much longer than that.

I’d been holding these paintings back over the past few years, waiting for the right moment. When I proposed this to Alexander Gray and the gallery team, they were immediately enthusiastic. And coincidentally, it landed at the same time as the Biennial, allowing my two different approaches to exhibition-making to be on view at the same time in my home city.

P: Was the timing something you felt clearly, or did it take longer to arrive at than you expected?

KA: I felt ready a year or two before the exhibition, but the timing worked out perfectly because I completed two paintings at the beginning of 2026, which are included in the show, and I feel are critical to the exhibition.

P: I keep coming back to the sense of seduction in these paintings, and to your long engagement with modernism’s anxiety around the decorative. How do you think about the relationship between seduction, ornament, and critique in this work?

KA: When I’m making an individual work, I don’t think about how it might perform a critique. I think about how to make it effective, present, and resolved. I think of criticality as something that exists within the practice as a whole. The very act of making these paintings the way that I make them, the relationships between the paintings, the sculptural works, and the collages, embodies that critique. I don’t ask each work to perform critically. And I don’t think critique and seduction are mutually exclusive.

Modernist painting can be just as seductive as an ornamental pattern on a carpet, but one is considered to be decorative and the other fine art. I think that dismantling this hierarchy and making it irrelevant are part of the same project. Perhaps by presenting it as irrelevant, we dismantle it.

What I’d also say is that these paintings can be read in reverse: not simply as ornamental forms entering the practice of modern painting, but as modern painting being ornamentalized. They’re made from the same elements as any abstract painting. The difference is structural, and a prejudiced art history has trained our eyes to read one arrangement of color and form as inferior to another.

P: The curvilinear passages in these paintings suggest script without actually being script. Is that a conscious reference to calligraphy, or did it emerge naturally?

KA: It’s not a conscious reference; calligraphy isn’t something I think about directly. But your question makes me want to dig into it, because a lot of things I do intuitively lead me to new references that I then consider more consciously.

What I understand about calligraphy across most traditions is that it is structured around a tension: the free movement of the hand performing within the stability of a grid or guideline. When you look at the arc of Islamic calligraphy, from its early geometric forms of Kufic script to more curvilinear, open modes such as Nastaliq, there’s a relationship to structure that becomes embodied over time. Perhaps it is even more apparent in East Asian traditions, in which muscle memory is developed through repetition, and then more freedom is allowed in the process of mark-making. That resonates with something in my own process. I suppose if my grid-based paintings have more in common with Islamic calligraphy, then these paintings have something in common with, say, Chinese calligraphy. But in most cases, it’s both.

Working with the grid for so many years, connecting point to point with curvilinear lines, my body has developed a memory for the gestures. When I remove the grid, as I have with most of the paintings in the Infrequencies exhibition, the memory of the grid remains without loyalty to the precision of the grid. The grid has been washed away, but it’s still present as a kind of ghost.

P: That image of the grid as a ghost, still present but washed away, makes me want to understand how that actually happens physically. Where does a painting begin for you?”

KA: The process actually starts before the grid, in the priming of the canvas. I use a thickened gesso, which is applied with a knife in a loose, organic manner, similar to how I imagine one would plaster a wall. This particular application is an essential part of the painting. Next, I draw the grid with a pencil and a straight edge on this surface. I then begin to draw with an oil crayon, searching for the composition. I wipe the drawing down with rags and solvent, adjusting and reworking the composition, and in this process, the canvas is stained with the marks of erasure. Traces of previous layers of drawing remain visible, and the process reveals the gesso marks, which appear as something not unlike Venetian plaster.

Once I have found a composition that I can work with, I begin to work with brushes. And from there, each painting takes its own course. Some become very layered, leaving no evidence of the gesso-ed surface or the grid, while others remain quite thin and restrained, allowing the texture of the gesso to have a prominent role in the final composition.

P: Having this show open in parallel with the Biennial creates an interesting double exposure of your practice. The Whitney carries a particular kind of cultural weight, meant to take the temperature of a moment.

KA: A biennial is always the curator’s vision of the current moment, and not a neutral survey. I find this particular edition genuinely exciting to be part of. I approached the Whitney installation the way I approach most of my solo exhibitions: by creating a context for the work through the work itself. In other words, wall painting and exhibition design, for me, are a way of unifying the different registers I work in. At the Whitney, even the security platform, which was required by the institution to protect the work, was incorporated into the exhibition design and became a part of the final installation.

P: You mentioned early on that some of these paintings go back to lockdown, and standing in front of something like Exuberant Flâneuse (2020), you feel that duration held inside it, in the layers, the revisions, the impasto that buries earlier decisions. Is time a medium for you? And is the time away from a painting the same kind of gesture as the time spent inside it?

KA: Time is certainly an important aspect of painting for me, as is restraint, and the two are related. Sometimes, restraint is simply spending an extended period of time looking at or putting a painting away for weeks or even months before returning to it. Sometimes, restraint is knowing when not to be in the studio, when to leave the paintings alone, and go to the park or to a museum.

Every painting is essentially an accumulation of marks, and that accumulation happens over an undetermined period. I have to stay open to allowing the painting to decide on its own how long it will take to present itself, and I need to have the sensitivity and openness to recognize this. Some paintings resolve in just a few sessions, while other paintings have to go past the point of being good, because a good-looking painting isn’t what I’m after. A painting can look good and still not emanate anything. Good paintings can be the most frustrating ones. I have to be patient, put them away, bring them back, allow them to change and evolve, and allow myself to change and evolve. Some of the works in this show went through that many times. And some paintings never come back from it. Not every seed grows.

P: Is that recognition, knowing when a painting has arrived or when it needs more, a feeling, or something more specific?

KA: It’s a feeling, but not an arbitrary one. I don’t think I’ve fully identified the criteria, and I’m not sure if it is important for me to do so.

Recently, I’ve been coming back to a line from Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” about cigarettes: A cigarette is the perfect type of perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. Perhaps that’s what I want from a painting. Not perfection, but something just short of it. Maybe something that leaves the viewer longing, although they may not even realize this is the case.

P: What sustains the practice outside the studio, what keeps you available to the work when you step away from it?

KA: Something I think about constantly is how to be fully present and genuinely open in the studio, which is incredibly difficult in New York City. In addition to the cacophony of the city, we are living in horrific times, in a world full of oppressive governments and violence. So how can I walk into the studio and be truly available to the work without carrying the stress and toxicity of the world outside of the studio?

I read a lot of artists’ writings, diaries, notebooks, and letters. Brian Eno’s published diary from 1994 is a book I return to over the years, rather than read straight through. At the time, he was working with U2, David Bowie, James, Laurie Anderson, and others while writing, making visual art, and traveling. The diary documents all of this as well as his processing of the atrocities in Bosnia, his curiosity about new technologies, some mundane aspects of his daily life, and so on. There’s something reassuring for me about this document that shows an artist who is able to process and reflect on the horrors of the world, while also remaining focused on the work he was doing in the studio, which isn’t directly addressing those horrors.

I’ve also gone on a deep dive into Joan Mitchell’s process over the past months. I recently wrote a text about her for the French publication Transatlantique. Her paintings are so present and unrestrained, and yet she was working at a time when it was challenging, to say the least, to be a woman painter. The sexism was not a backdrop; it was constant and structural. She had to find a way to remain present in the studio. She talked about her two identities: Big Joan and Little Joan. Big Joan was the public figure who moved through the world and protected Little Joan. Little Joan was the painter. I find that formulation useful, not as an anecdote but as a real psychological structure. How can an artist stay porous enough to receive something in the studio, while protecting oneself from being destroyed by what’s outside the studio?

Kamrooz Aram’s “Infrequencies” is on view at Alexander Gray Associates, 384 Broadway, New York, from February 20 to April 11, 2026.