Both types of black/white painting seem based on ad hoc improvisation. They have an alluring looseness in their treatment of space, and avoid formal balancing or rigidly orthodox clichéd composition. The non-organic spatial ones are quite contemplative, being less narrative, more perceptual, and freer of associations than the cellular works. More akin to say Robert Irwin, being more bodily in the experiential sense.
Here at Sumer, within this presentation of five b/w canvas paintings by Australian artist Stephen Bram, there are both cellular and pointillist images, one dwelling on immersive bloodlike liquid with corpuscles or penetrated microscopic body tissue; the other in air, or amongst architectural planes that seem on the verge of forming modular grids.
Creepy carcinogenic associations are present in the first, whilst in the second, the clusters of roughly painted black daubs also suggest bacteria in a Petrie dish. When flipped from horizontal to vertical, the dish becomes a series of overlapping floating rectangular curtains of shimmering dots hovering in uneven densities...
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