Jim Kempner Fine Art is pleased to announce To A Groove, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Jim Watt. 

Painter Jim Watt explores the thresholds where opposites meet—surface and depth, harmony and dissonance, structure and freedom. Watt investigates how scale, material, and perception can be manipulated to create paintings that hover between dimensional realities–where space is not an object but a container. In his latest series, To a Groove, his canvases teeter between the tactile presence of paint and the illusion of infinite spatial depth, between the physical fact of the surface and the imagined space that pulls the eye through it.

At the heart of Watt’s practice is an improvisational energy drawn from jazz. Like a musician working within and against a melody, Watt approaches the canvas in the same way. The canvas is both a composition and a field of discovery—testing the limits of form while allowing for chance, rhythm, and intuition. Jazz, for Watt, embodies a non-dualistic way of seeing: it is structured and unstructured, melodic and dissonant, familiar and unpredictable. His paintings inhabit that same non-duality of tension and play, where opposites dance and dissolve into one another.

In To A Groove, each work holds a visual rhythm that invites viewers to look, lose orientation, and find it again. Watt’s paintings don’t resolve; they move to a groove and ask us to stay with the uncertainty of their unfolding—to listen, as one does to jazz, for the moment when chaos and clarity become the same thing.

For more information, please contact Erin Tisdel, [email protected]