Gagosian is pleased to present “Geometry of Light,” new and recent paintings by Y.Z. Kami. This is his first solo exhibition in Paris.
Y.Z. Kami’s large-scale portraits recreate the visceral experience of a face-to-face encounter. Through a matte, uniform haze, he depicts his subjects with eyes open or closed, gazing forward or looking down. Continuing the art historical quest to locate the unknown within material form, his portraits and abstractions serve as poignant evocations of the sublime.
In this exhibition, Kami aligns the questions of portraiture with the patterns and processes of geometry, considering various ways to seek and represent truth. In one gallery, he juxtaposes two Dome paintings, comprised of concentric circles of tessellated marks, with a looming depiction of the plaster death mask of Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth century French mathematician, writer, and theologian. Pascal spent much of his life investigating the definition of “truth,” arguing that mathematic principles were as close to perfect as they could be, despite their inevitable reliance on approximation. In Kami’s painting, Pascal’s eyes are permanently closed, while the luminous White Domes expand and contract, asserting geometric approximations of their own.
