Tension 36" x 36"

See more art from the 2025 New Works

James Nowak’s Tension, part of his 2025 New Works Collection, situates itself at the crossroads of painterly spontaneity and geometric order. The work operates within the vocabulary of abstraction, but it stages a dialogue between two opposing artistic impulses: the structured clarity of hard-edge geometry and the unrestrained energy of gestural mark-making. By juxtaposing these languages, Nowak invites the viewer into a field of negotiation where harmony and discord are constantly at play.

The painting’s surface is divided into fields of color blocks—red, teal, orange, and blue rectangles—that ground the composition in architectural solidity. These elements act as stabilizing forces, suggesting balance and rationality. Superimposed over them are sweeping, gestural strokes of green, ochre, and crimson, executed with a raw immediacy that contrasts sharply with the precise edges of the underlying forms.

This interplay is not a collapse of order into chaos, but rather a staging of their coexistence. The brushstrokes refuse to remain confined within the boundaries of the rectangles, while the rectangles resist dissolution into pure painterly flux. The result is a palpable visual tension—a productive friction that animates the canvas.

Color functions here as both mediator and instigator. The bold primaries and secondaries—particularly the deep ultramarine band cutting across the horizontal axis—anchor the eye, while the layered strokes in earthier, more tactile hues disrupt that stability. The chromatic scheme recalls the optimism of modernist abstraction, but Nowak complicates that legacy by overlaying it with painterly gestures that resist containment, almost as if the human hand is rebelling against the rigidity of pure form.

*Tension* can be read as a meditation on dualities:

• Control vs. Freedom: The rigid geometry symbolizes structure, design, and intentionality, while the gestural marks embody improvisation and chance.
• Modernism vs. Postmodernism: The dialogue between hard-edge abstraction and expressive brushwork reflects art historical tensions between movements, as if Nowak is collapsing decades of painterly debate onto a single surface.
• Surface vs. Depth: Though flat in execution, the overlaying strokes and color blocks create a push-and-pull that gives the work a spatial dynamism.

In this sense, the painting does not resolve the opposition but sustains it, creating a visual environment where contradiction is not failure but vitality.

Nowak’s New Works Collection (2025) reflects a mature phase of experimentation, where his interest lies not in choosing between competing aesthetics but in inhabiting their overlap. Tension epitomizes this inquiry. The painting suggests that meaning emerges not from synthesis but from the sustained coexistence of difference.

*Tension* is an apt title for a work that thrives on the friction between structure and spontaneity. James Nowak transforms the canvas into a stage where opposing forces confront one another without collapse, producing an experience that is both unsettling and invigorating. It stands as a testament to abstraction’s ongoing vitality in 2025, proving that even in well-trodden terrain, new energy can emerge from the act of holding contradictions in suspension.