“The enduring quality of abstraction is its ability to arouse visceral reactions regardless of the viewer’s frame of reference. My first encounter with Ms. Fromm’s work evoked an amorphous energy - sometimes gentle, sometimes intense.
I watched her work change in a provocative way. She began to provide a structure or parameter into which this energy was installed by providing a simple line or various lines as the organizing force.
The power of the line when separated from its use as description allows it to perform, in Jessica’s work, as both an emotional quantity and at the same time a stability. The work achieves a stasis in this contradictory equation.
In the abstract arena, where originality seems to have run its course, Ms. Fromm’s work encourages a desire to see what the next piece will be; what new contradictions will exist; what new surprises will she create.
Judith Landsman
Curator/artist/educator
September 2006

Statement of the Artist

Why do I paint?

It is for me the best kind of work. In abstract painting I am seeing what I think, I can think about what I see, emotions and moods are made visible on the canvas.
It might not be the quickest route to capture visually what I think and feel (sometimes representation can provide that) but for me it is the surest.

In our present culture we are surrounded by so much visual information and obsessed with such a quantity of visual entertainment, our world is suffused with such a voluminous history of satisfying life-enhancing painting – how am I as a visual artist to cut through this glutted environment, to reach the viewer hold his/her attention, invite even a brief tete-a-tete?

In a world full of icons (religious, art-historical, consumerist), and by icons I mean pieces to which we give ‘visual lip-service’, those which we recognize in an instant, genuflect in front of and move on from just as quickly, how do we as viewers connect with visual art? What quality is it that holds our attention on a work of art so that we can take an active part in its existence and with that process of communication continue to make it relevant in our lives?

In my work as a painter, abstraction has always provided the vehicle. I appreciate the flexibility of abstraction and when, periodically, I become convinced that my approach is becoming too routinized and reflexive I chart out a new path between brush and canvas.

My current show developed, for the first time in my career, all of a piece. It resulted from two sources. Having always viewed my painting as essentially unbound by the perimeter of the canvas as though the imagery were but a snap-shot of the universe, and finally feeling controlled by the constancy of that approach, I was possessed by a sense of urgency to project a figure-ground statement. That and my everyday ‘conversation’ with one particular painting, stood side-ways next to my work-space by the artist who works in the neighboring studio, whose qualities so different from my own work I yearned to possess, led to this new group of paintings.

Remarkably, the inchoate churning of my thoughts and my meditation on those qualities flowed onto the canvases so that I presented myself with visualizations of my painting ideas. I was then able to ‘converse’ with my materials and follow those ideas wherever they led. At first I added a matrix to one of my all-over paintings which felt too familiar to me and which I could not otherwise finish to my satisfaction. With the imposition of this grid I found that the painting finally made sense to me. Establishing the suggestion of straight line and grid, eventually from the first, carried me forward in my work. The paintings fairly rapidly led to the very vertical, parallel, orderly imagery seen in several of the works, an imagery familiar in recent art history.

So why do I call this body of work, “Confounding Expectations” - what could I possibly mean by that? Something in me rebelled at every step against a mechanical and measured use of line and grid. In place of those rational qualities I substituted intuition and a freer hand. My organizing lines remained in the realm of painterly-ness and as the fields of color and canvas ‘straightened up’ I found my hand refusing to go to expected places, subverting even my own anticipations. The paintings might look very familiar but they are different, they are themselves. My philosophical attitude of keeping myself and my viewers in the present is expressed in this way.

Jessica Fromm
December 2006