Solomon Rousseau

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Artist statement

Solomon Rousseau is a Jamaican-American artist currently based in Los Angeles. His practice spans sculpture, painting, installation and photography. By exploring how reduction, repetition and physical process can yield forms and experiences that are primitive and formal, the artist engages the legacies of Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, and Mono-Ha among others, pursuing investigation of the quiet tension between control and impermanence. Rousseau's work is a meditation. The process is a laborious cycle of destruction and creation, seeking harmony between chaos and order. Through alchemical methods and material research, chance and ambiguity are married to structure - the gestures and compositions echo natural accidents and overlooked phenomena. Accomplished using utilitarian industrial materials such as metal, wood, stone, oil paint, and rubber, while using traditional techniques with manual tools. The materials are not used to depict, but to reveal traces of the transformations — their textures and densities, become records of touch, gravity, and time. This invisible labor, addresses an existential condition, blurring the boundary between making and being. The works are not representations, but encounters: inviting the viewer to pause, to inhabit the interval between seeing and feeling, and to sense the resonance, where silence, space, and process become the true medium. This enlightened approach has evolved through an unconventional path of study independent of...

Artwork