Mirage: David Frazer

Mirage is the gallery’s third solo exhibition by abstract, improvisational painter David Frazer. This exhibition presents fourteen new oil paintings that continue Frazer’s decades-long inquiry into painting as a self-sufficient language. Where much of contemporary art leans toward narrative,
politics, or figuration, Frazer remains a purist: his canvases are fields of discovery for color, form, space, and the act of painting itself. 

Frazer’s paintings are composed through a continuous layering of textures, colors, and forms, as if each canvas were a Rorschach layered upon Rorschach; imagery emerges and dissolves, planes converge into new textural realities. Frazer often incorporates pictorial elements into his
paintings as poetic anchors within abstraction: eggs as vessels of fragility and rebirth, tulips in homage to his wife Anneke, and birds as meditations on freedom and transience. In Mirage, six 10x10 paintings will forsake motif entirely for pure painterly improvisation, while eight large-scale works continue the dialogue between abstraction and image.

At once meditative and restless, Frazer’s methodology converses with that of Cezanne, Morandi, Ryder, and Guston. Echoing these predecessors, Frazer insists on the viability of painting as a rigorous, adventurous practice, one capable of unveiling meaning through process alone. His practice upholds the maxim ut pictura poeisis: as painting, so poetry, treating each stroke or wash of color as rhythm, rhyme, and meter. With Mirage, Frazer extends
his established body of work while introducing new variations in scale and approach, reaffirming the role of abstraction and discovery in a contemporary art world often dominated by distraction.