As an artist and poet, my practice exists at the intersection of language, painting, and poetry. I approach language not merely as a tool for communication but as a material: flexible, unstable, and generative. My work investigates how text can operate beyond its semantic function, becoming visual, spatial, and experiential. I’m particularly drawn to the moment where language begins to dissolve, where it flickers between legibility and abstraction, inviting a more embodied and durational engagement with meaning.
I draw on a lineage that blurs disciplinary boundaries, looking to the traditions of concrete poetry, Dada, and postwar abstraction. Through painting, I rework poetic fragments, layering them until they lose syntactic clarity and morph into fields of visual resonance. The process is iterative and improvisational. Words are distorted, buried, and revealed again, disrupting linear reading and encouraging reflection and reinterpretation. This instability is not a failure of language but a condition I embrace, one that mirrors how meaning is continuously formed, undone, and reassembled in an exchange between the artist and viewer.
Text, when treated as material, can shift registers, moving from idea to image, from structure to gesture. In both my paintings and poems, language becomes temporal, ephemeral, and immersive. I view the slippages between the aesthetic and linguistic domains not as breakdowns but as opportunities, moments when language becomes alive, surprising, and resistant to resolution.
My work aims to disrupt passive consumption and open new ways of experiencing language in visual form. It is an invitation to linger in the in-between, where subjective meaning is unstable, shifting, and full of possibility.
-Sam Jablon