Augustine Kofie: Adventures In Tonality

The title of the exhibition refers to a term coined by George Russel, an American modern jazz musician and theorist whose work re-conceptualize the matching between chords and scales, offering to the musician or composer the tonal liberty. "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."

Augustine Kofie's relation to the form proceeds from the same time from geometric architectural rigor through his layout of lines and angles —more and more acute years passing by—, and from the harmony of colors —more and more sweet— and also curves, circles and half-circles that are coming to structure the composition. As for music it still is the center of his work and guide his gesture. For each of his exhibitions he composes a soundtrack (on listenning via Mixcloud) to guide visitors through the sensorial apprehension oh his work. "The show's accompanying 20-minute soundtrack pulled selections from my personal collection of jazz records, boasting extended, up-cycled, dusty jazz loops, spacey atmospheric transitions, lo-fi vintage cinematic intermissions, and relevant dialogue sampled from obscure films. These sounds are the driving force behind the artworks."