Keijsers Koning will present "Grey Lagoons," a solo exhibition by Gary Panter. The show features a series of drawings and works on canvas that explore the fusion of representational narratives with abstraction. These compositions challenge our sensibilities and dismantle conventional notions of the norm.

The all-over compositions suggest an erasure of narrative or at least our expectation of one. Each work cuts its own form, like a brine pool formation in a vast ocean that never quite mixes with the overlying seawater. While Panter uses cartoons to tell stories and investigate the formal aspects of narration, the introduction of gestured abstraction liberates these forms, allowing him to come fully into his own. Non-figurative work can emerge when stylization becomes so extreme that it arrives at non-objective territory. This is where Panter's hand-painted dot compositions come into play.

In cartoons and illustration, dots have long served as textural devices for filtering or obscuring. Panter transforms this convention, using dots as a filter that converts non-objective paintings into something more alien than typical painted abstraction, yet strangely familiar. Through his deconstruction of cartoon imagery, particularly the negative space between comic forms, these voids become opportunities and the basis for abstraction, losing all reference to the imagery from which they derive. Panter elevates negative space into a weighted form of its own, finding freedom not through rejection of his roots within cartooning but excavating the formal DNA and reveal the new possibilities.

Following the opening reception, the exhibit will be on view through December 29.