Opening reception: March 28, 6—8pm
Morgan Presents is proud to inaugurate its new gallery space in Chelsea with “Linger Longer,” a show of recent paintings by Sam Jablon, the New York-based artist and poet. It follows “Color/Code,” a two-person show with Jablon and Odili Donald Odita that opened at Morgan Presents in September 2021. “Linger Longer” is Jablon’s first solo show in New York since 2018, and comes after recent exhibitions of new work in California and Europe.
For the last decade, Jablon has been pushing two forms, painting and poetry, to their limits, exploring the notion of how the two can collide with each other to an obsessive degree. Jablon studied with Anne Waldman at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, and then got a MFA in Visual Art at Brooklyn College. Backed by these heady dueling apprenticeships, Jablon exploded on the scene with paintings heavy on language that also pushed language to the brink, never shying away from the slap in the face of the right word. The title of this show comes from a full poem in which the chosen phrases both denote meaning—love and loss, chaos and redemption—but also glorify the combinations of characters on a blank page. Taken as they are, the letters are long-limbed diagrams of aesthetic brilliance to be adored, existing to be worshiped.
The love of the look of language has been a driving force behind Jablon’s groundbreaking visual art practice, which I’ve had the pleasure of watching evolve over this last decade. These newest works—forged from a place of immense contemplation into how humans both inspire and infuriate each other—are monumental things, confident, with no subtext needed. The brushwork is ballsy, intentional, embracing a big lushness, unafraid of being paintings. And yet they open up upon contemplation, as the poem’s fragments echo off the canvases and harmonize. The stanzas weave their way through the suite, and Jablon’s kinship with the words means he can push them, hide them, scuff them up, kick them while they're down, or even completely erase them from the frame. The canvases display the disembodied fragments of the poem—“DESIRE,” “LOVER LOVER LOVER,” “WHIPLASH PLEASURE,” “GLAMOROUS VOIDS”—and the fragments appear as runes from an ancient time until that glimmer of denoted meaning sends a chill up the spine.
Taken as a whole, “Linger Longer” amounts to a new peak for Jablon. “The works are about being alive in moments of chaos,” he told me. Chaos may reign, but after spending time breathing in these new paintings, in a marvelous brand new gallery space, we can talk ourselves into living the good life.
—Nate Freeman