Overview

Amadour’s California Incline series (2023– ) is a central and ongoing body of work within their practice. Inspired by the Art Deco California Incline bridge in Santa Monica, initially completed in 1933 and reconstructed in 2016, a civic passage descending toward the Pacific Coast Highway, the series translates architecture into geometric abstraction shaped by light, rhythm, and perspectival inquiry.

Built through layered acrylic mediums, graphite, and leafed metals, including gold, silver, and palladium, on linen or canvas, the paintings form light-responsive planes that shift with the viewer’s movement. Horizontal divisions reference the meeting of ocean and the sky. At the same time, hard-edged graphite lines and iridescent Flashe paint markings recall musical notation, allowing the works to register rhythm through structure and form. Rather than depicting landscape, the series focuses on how place is experienced through elevation, descent, and refracted light.

Art Historical Context

Art historically, the California Incline series draws from West Coast geometric abstraction, Light and Space practices, and Italian Minimalism, shaped by the legacy of Arte Povera, particularly in its attention to material restraint, surface, and chromatic subtlety. Positioning geometric abstraction as a site where personal experience and collective history intersect, the California Incline series frames infrastructure not as backdrop but as a threshold, situating the work within the legacies of postwar abstraction and the architectural languages of the contemporary American West. Amadour’s engagement with serial abstraction is informed by Richard Diebenkorn, whose work they studied closely while writing an essay for the artist’s centennial, examining their shared geographic relationship to California’s coastal architecture and spatial logic.

Selected Lineages and References

Points of reference include Ettore Spalletti’s Stanza Azzurra (2006) for its tonal atmosphere; Mary Obering’s Outside and Inside (1975) for its architectural framing; and Mary Corse’s Untitled (White Arch Inner Band Series) (1996) for its engagement with reflectivity, movement, and California’s highway systems. The series also resonates with the layered spatial rhythms of Julie Mehretu’s Berliner Plätze (2009) and with the foundational principles of abstraction articulated by Wassily Kandinsky in Composition 8 (Komposition 8) (1923). Art Deco spatial logic further informs the work through the interior gouaches of Erté, including Elaborate black and gold interior with tiger rug, where pattern and structure operate as compositional systems.

Selected Works