For more than twenty years, Kareem Risan has depicted his surroundings as richly painted surfaces free of temporal or spatial boundaries. Without references to the hermetic space of the canvas (or paper), Risan employs color as a compositional directive. The artist’s varying treatment of paint is emphasized with the opacity or radiance of particular hues, and becomes the primary source of tension in his works. Despite initial disorder, the divergent sections of the composition are synthesized, appearing to move in unison, as saturated color fields are partly covered by brushstrokes that drip down the canvas.