Myron Stout: “Charcoal Drawings” at Peter Freeman, Inc., in New York: Art Exhibition Review

Looking at the late Myron Stout’s art that was featured in a recent exhibition at Peter Freeman, Inc., in New York, I remembered.

Stout’s exhibited art was a series of charcoal drawings, with forms depicting the human, the inhabited, and the abstract — though that last category, which was a majority of the exhibition, was richly evocative of place.

Stout’s many forms — and his less strictly defined areas of pigment — overlapped and leaned against each other, nodding to both the experience of physical space in its limiting, formal reality and what transcends it — a daily, growing transmutation of space into perception. Stout’s art suggested that physical space is already transforming and growing into the feeling of it within the first moments of contact and interaction with it — and that the confining realities of these environments are only really completed once they’re given their own space to move, growing into recollection and vision. A floor, a house, a wall, a building: these and more all are becoming a story as we venture within their confines and look around.

Utilizing sharp lines and angles time and again, and with the color palette just a black and white, Stout’s work sometimes reminded me of something specific, like areas of tile flooring that here were rising well beyond their natural state while still holding onto part of their originally defining essence. The art was a journey of the structural and architectural becoming something circulating: a smoothly flowing state of shift that Stout drew out of forms often, if considered in isolation, very strict. Here, that strictness and structure melded directly into a story in which the latent potential was becoming manifest.

The sharp, the structural… here, it was all reaching. Stout placed his many sharp formations in ultimately plaintive, unassuming, and straightforward comparative isolation. The art trended towards directness. But these shapes, containing remnants of imaginable purpose suggested by the architecture-like forms showing up, started to fold, started to shift, started to sing, and started to grasp. The forms became a language, embodying and communicating a wish, hope, confusion, stateliness, the passage of time, and more: graspable feelings that here become fleeting, as fleeting as charcoal forms on paper that frequently refuse to directly parallel anything precise.

And so together, the more abstract pieces do not directly point to any specific place but still point towards the experience of a place, casting that trek through it, that lived journey of it, as one much more permeable and inwardly spacious than we are perhaps used to. It’s a journey of becoming. The spatial progression that starts to take shape by way of Stout’s corners and angles ends up going around in circles, in some ways. It’s movement that breathes and slips. Stout creates a feeling of physical space and places the next space atop or alongside the first, finding a unity to the structures that we’re looking at and transforming structure into something palpitating, shifting, and growing.

I feel the elevation of the present within these artworks and the smooth intertwining of questions and uncertainty within the experience of it. I remember so many specific places that I’ve been, all coalescing into something more than they ever were physically by way of my associations with them, both those drawn from the moment and those accumulated over time. Similarly, Stout’s art complicates the specific: a momentary step becomes a juncture already moving into the next one, and the next. Stillness within a space, even a basic one we might take for granted ordinarily, becomes a story and more than itself.

It’s all a language of space, a linguistics of movement, in which meaning starts to take shape relationally and progressively, though the world of experienced movement tends to stop with one moment at a time. That’s all we ever experience… but, there’s more. And so an imagined, tiled place… the basic mundanity of a floor that I’ve either seen or am just imagining… it’s here with me. It was there with me in the exhibition, and it’s here with me now.

Stout’s exhibition is already closed, but his artwork is in the collection of major institutions including The Met and the Museum of Modern Art, both in New York City.

Featured image: Myron Stout: “Charcoal Drawings” (installation view) at Peter Freeman, Inc., New York, January 16 – March 1, 2025. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc., New York / Paris. Photography by Nicholas Knight.