Contributed by Sharon Butler / On view in the upstairs gallery at Bortolami, Enzo Shalom’s paintings – modest in image and muted in palette – carry a quiet intensity that has felt rare among young New York painters in recent years. At a time when traditional painterly bravado dominates, Shalom takes a different route, making vulnerability seem like a radical act. His work leans into restraint: awkward angles, washed-out tones, and just enough mark-making to read as intentional without seeming overworked. If you can imagine early Luc Tuymans’ bleached-out hues, EJ Hauser’s jagged lines, and Gary Stephan’s off-kilter compositions, you’ll land somewhere near the world of Shalom’s paintings. It’s a subdued, thoughtful space, low-key but deeply engaging.
What does vulnerability look like in abstraction? For Shalom, it’s all about formal choices. He avoids predictable compositional tropes and simple art-historical references. He dials back the color, resists saturation, and relinquishes some control. His brushwork is most compelling when it seems to meander, unhurried, without a fixed destination. Scale plays a role too. While oversized canvases often scream ambition, Shalom’s mid-scale works play to a sense of intimacy. Reinforcing this resolute unobtrusiveness, there is no press release and all the paintings in the show are untitled.
Shalom’s published bio is brief. He earned degrees from Bard College and Staedelschule in Frankfurt, Germany, In 2024, his work was included in “Yours Truly,” a massive group show of self-portraits curated by Eleanor Cayre at Nahmad Contemporary. In his last NYC solo show, at Jenny’s in 2021, he presented a series of delicate, quasi-narrative drawings.
These paintings move in a different direction. When Shalom gets it right, the work really sings. My favorite pieces are the ones with a kind of mysterious specificity, in which images almost coalesce into something recognizable without tipping into representation. The more complicated, fussy pieces – which are few – don’t grab me as forcefully. In those, he might have gotten a little lost chasing the mystery, adding too many elements instead of completely trusting in the power of his surfaces and brushwork. Shalom is at his gently captivating best when he brushes up against the real without ever pointing straight at it.
“Enzo Shalom,” Bortolami Gallery, 39 Walker Street, New York, NY. Through April 19, 2025.
About the author: Sharon Butler is a painter and the publisher of Two Coats of Paint.
