During an Eternity
RAINRAIN
October 24–November 22, 2025
New York
For his first solo exhibition—presented at RAINRAIN—Jameson Magrogan, a 2021 MFA graduate of Hunter College, presents During an Eternity. The exhibition consists of six large-scale paintings in which Magrogan employs color—both opaque and transparent—to explore his relationship with the surface he is working on, as well as the history of abstraction writ large.
Approaching an empty canvas is always a daunting task, especially in our contemporary moment. The medium of painting carries a weight, one accumulated by the practices of thousands of artists over hundreds of years. Historically, the art school model teaches about artists who have come before—their palettes, their subjects or lack thereof—in reference to practice. Must artists erase all or most prior knowledge, allowing their instinctual mind-body to take over, for the work to be successful?
The title of Magrogan’s exhibition functions as an oxymoron, since during suggests a stretch of time set in motion with a possible beginning and end, while eternity is infinite and outside of time. One might imagine the phase as referring to a discrete phenomenon that occurs or is segmented within an ongoing or unending sequence. An individual painting has a beginning and end, borders, limitations. Yet, as a whole, one might argue that painting as a practice falls within the realm of sempiternity, the endless duration through time.
The work that shares the name of the exhibition, During an Eternity (all works 2025), is an acrylic painting, 70 by 58 inches, painted in royal tones of golden yellows and deep plums, with lightness at the top and denseness towards the lower part of the canvas. Magrogan uses varied techniques in application: pouring, scraping, wiping away, and using metal plates and perforated vinyl as a means to press the medium onto the surface. Devoid of traditional application and any purposeful moments of representation, color-scapes like During an Eternity give the viewer permission to explore the space of the canvas as a map without a destination.