OPENING RECEPTION
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2026
5-8 PM

ON VIEW
SEPTEMBER 18 - OCTOBER 17, 2026

FOR INQUIRES
Please contact hello@chefasprojects.com

Chefas Projects is pleased to present Galvanized, the first solo exhibition at the gallery by Portland artist Bobby Adams. On view September 18 through October 17, the exhibition brings together seven new gradient paintings that extend Adams’s ongoing investigation into color, movement, precision, and reduction.

Working with hard edges and meticulously calibrated color transitions, Adams constructs paintings that appear at once exacting and elusive. Color becomes both subject and structure: gradients shift across the surface with a measured sense of movement, while simplified compositions heighten the perceptual effects of scale, saturation, and transition. The paintings inhabit a productive space between the mechanical and the handmade, where precision does not eliminate the presence of the artist but makes it more apparent.

Adams’s approach is informed by a background outside of traditional art-making. Before turning to painting in 2017, he worked in product development and ran a clothing line for eight years. That experience with materials, systems, color, and visual identity remains embedded in his practice. His paintings share an affinity with the economy and immediacy of graphic design while resisting its fixedness; seemingly simple arrangements become dynamic through subtle shifts in color and proportion.

The title Galvanized gestures toward a central tension within the work: the desire to achieve a polished, controlled image alongside the inevitable irregularities of its making. Adams’s paintings are rigorously constructed, but they are not anonymous. Their surfaces hold the evidence of decisions, adjustments, and the physical act of painting.

Running through the exhibition is Adams’s longstanding relationship to NASCAR, a significant influence on his upbringing and visual sensibility. The sport’s saturated palettes, speed, spectacle, and graphic intensity provide an unexpected point of departure for paintings that are otherwise characterized by restraint. In California Poppy, this connection is particularly pronounced. Its color relationships carry the visual charge of racing culture while being distilled through Adams’s pared-down formal language.

The result is a body of work in which speed is suggested rather than depicted, and where movement emerges from the most economical means. Adams takes visual cues associated with motion, competition, and spectacle and subjects them to the slower, more deliberate logic of abstraction.

Galvanized marks an important step in Adams’s relationship with the gallery, following his inclusion in multiple group exhibitions and establishing a sustained presentation of his practice through a focused body of new work.

ARTWORK

INSTALLATION IMAGES

© CHEFAS PROJECTS
Photo credit: Mario Gallucci