Jon Axelrod

Jon Axelrod puts musical arrangements on canvas by deploying innumerable expressive forms. Their distinctly musical properties convey rhythm through their alternating shapes, and the varying silent spaces between them. The Florida native recently graduated from Pratt and lives in Brooklyn, where he also works in sculpture, drawing and photography. His paintings are extremely intricate and abstract, conveying movement and energy without depicting identifiable entities. These colorful forms, nonetheless, take on distinct characteristics of shape, weight and movement. The effect is of a choreographed dance of vaguely cubist abstractions over the canvas's surface.

Indeed, Axelrod also composes digital music, which then serves as inspiration for much of his visual artworks. Not surprisingly, then, his paintings are extremely expressive. Their titles and expressionistic properties create coherent meaning despite the canvases' abstraction. Through form, alternation, color and shading, Jon Axelrod visualizes the ideas expressed by his titles, while also offering viewers many other interpretations. His paintings' titles, then, become only one of the many ways his audience might hear his works.