Elias Melad
PHONET
January 14 - February 6, 2022

My Pet Ram is pleased to present PHONET, the first solo exhibition in New York by Brooklyn-based artist Elias Melad.

There’s something unassuming about Elias Melad’s latest paintings, no tricks bragged about, a quiet confidence that encodes a convincing humanity in visual terms — worlds made of drifting thoughts, incomplete systems and scrambled parts holding together. But the emphases, the accents and slurrings, the gaps and oddball drop-ins (what are those arrow-like forms in Second Voyage?) stop the easy naming. The paintings are picturing more complex feelings and ideas than were initially apparent. Their oscillation of lyricism and strangeness won’t stop, one begetting the other.

Questions come up about the decorative or pleasing as risk, if the paintings can keep just shy of harmonizing, both about-to and resistant-to. Analogies from daily life arise: the water-damaged unreadable note found in the street that still carries the human wish to record or communicate something; the eloquent but mute pavement of a weathered sidewalk that is simultaneously singular and generic; or specific dreams felt but forgotten. What is the risk that keeps the mind looking into these paintings? Perhaps it’s in concretizing in painting terms the assertion that the rounded edge still cuts.

While Melad’s new paintings are looser and lusher, shedding the tighter control and representational depiction of his previous work, they remain connected to his past in their reassembly of differently sourced elements and in their sureness of touch and tone. Their excerpted components also remain unreturned to the readability of their originating systems, but are somehow at peace with that. Into beds of choral sound, the leads are singing the lyrics with a calculated degree of distance — canceling the sentiment that the artist knows will rush in otherwise. What seems initially wholehearted has stayed rightly halved. Phonetic singing is lustless but full of longing. Here, worlds and the want of them are seen together.

Drew Beattie

A search for sublimity embodies these recent works. Mass influences of communication melding together in an attempt to create a memory of a song, of an equation, of a poem. The harmony just under a melody that you can’t quite place, often a disorienting feeling of deja vu. Notes repeat in unplayable ways, staffs become oceans of waves undulating through and on top of a dissolving field. A new language is in process. Can these interpretations still hold the power of the original, once its parts are laid bare? Would a composer see these and hear them?

Elias Melad

PHONET will be on view Friday, January 14, 2022 through Sunday, February 6, 2022. The gallery is located at 48 Hester Street in the Lower East Side. Gallery hours are Wed-Sun from 12-7pm and by appointment. Following state and local guidelines, face masks are required and visitors are asked to kindly adhere to social distancing. For inquiries and more information about this exhibition, please email info@mypetram.com.