Adventures in Tonality
Augustine Kofie
Galerie Openspace Paris, France
January 18 - February 8, 2020
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“Adventures in tonality” is a term coined by George Russell, an American modern jazz musician and theorist, for the first codified original theory to come from jazz. The theory re-conceptualized the matching of scales and chords, granting the player or composer tonal freedom. I drew inspiration from this notion of freedom, as well as jazz’s processes of improvisation.


A technical illustrator at heart, my painting and collage is often based on sketches. This time, I used no sketches as reference. Instead, the work in this run was created through freestyle, intuition, and improvisation, producing a painterly, atmospheric series in a dusky palette, while still exploring collisions of forms, layers and transparencies to create abstract scenarios that somehow hang outside of time.


The show’s accompanying 20-minute soundtrack samples my personal collection of jazz records, boasting extended, up-cycled, dusty jazz loops, spacey atmospheric transitions, lo-fi vintage cinematic intermissions, and relevant dialogue pupped from films. These sounds are the driving force behind the artworks.

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