Fran Shalom: Merging vernaculars

Contributed by Adam Simon / I’ve been aware of Fran Shalom’s paintings for a while and have been interested in how at times they seem like a comic version of abstract painting. She excels at what I would call formal wit, eliciting not a belly laugh but a knowing smile from those familiar with the vernacular. Her humor is a foil of sorts, providing cover for a serious investigation into the way shapes can carry associations and embody feelings. Looking at one of Shalom’s paintings can be as psychologically charged as an encounter with an eccentric person. My assumption is that the paintings are arrived at, as the title of her current show at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, “Everyday Improvisations,” suggests, through trial and error. Beneath each painting are earlier versions that belie the simplicity of the finished work. Her process is not tongue-in-cheek but a hard-won quest for a moment of coherence and surprise, in which an arrangement of shapes becomes something more.

Many of the paintings at Markel feature a central shape in what feels like an extreme close-up against an often high-keyed monochrome ground. Her canvases are mostly modest in size and often square. I’m not sure what role the square format plays. Traditionally, painters think of squares as not-landscape, not-portrait. Perhaps this means it lends itself to the non-objective, à la Albers. But in Shalom’s work, though she does not employ figurative painting strategies per se, the centralized shapes feel like protagonists engaged in some inappropriate behavior that we are invited to watch. Occasionally, this behavior becomes more explicit. Take the Offer includes what looks like a spout dribbling a faint trail of paint drips. Linger involves a grey furniture-esque form awkwardly trying to grasp something like a pool cue. Insight features a yellow expanse made to resemble an air bag by the addition of an apparent valve. These allusions are never more than hints. Shalom’s paintings evoke things in the world, but not to the point of us naming them. We might have a ghost of a memory of turning a page in a book with a photo of poplar trees, but we don’t see the book or the trees when we look at Recall. The episode remains an association that lingers beneath the surface. 

Painting always includes an element of play. Somehow, this element can coexist with the loftiest ambitions and the most philosophical of explorations. In Shalom’s work, large areas of flat color might seem innately cartoonish, but they are not cartoons. Their elemental nature fosters a kind of visual drama not otherwise possible. For me, the least successful paintings in the show are the ones where too many smaller decisions interrupt the primary relationships. There’s a lot of painting around that incorporates figurative elements into abstract fields. Shalom, by contrast, pushes abstract painting to a point where it verges on a kind of animism. In a sense she is merging two vernaculars – one of minimalist abstraction and the other of animated imagery familiar to anyone who remembers sitting in front of a TV as a small child. There’s considerably more Ellsworth Kelly or Paul Feeley or Helen Frankenthaler here than there is Pokémon or Sponge Bob Square Pants. But the fact that I feel OK referencing a couple of kiddie television shows in a sentence that also notes three prominent twentieth-century painters provides some idea of how her work both extends and problematizes the formal arena of abstract painting. 

“Fran Shalom: Everyday Improvisations,” Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, 179 10th Avenue, New York, NY. Through December 6, 2025.

About the author: Adam Simon is a New York artist and writer. His most recent solo painting show was at OSMOS in 2024.