Seraphin Gallery announces, Abstraction: Three Views, an exhibition of abstract paintings by three emerging Philadelphia artists: Robert Goodman, Jon Manteau, and Ben Will. These artists present Philadelphia with a nuanced take on the condition/s of abstract painting. Working out three utterly distinct facilities, all three painters share the desire to break free from the ideological restraints of the last fifty years of abstract theory. Pushing past major idioms represented in contemporary exigencies these three artists use paint as a tool for transcribing the conditions of present day socio-cultural/artistic concerns into a reduced form that consequently functions as a spontaneous visual force. Robert Goodman, a phenomenologist of sorts, utilizes catastrophic imagery as a source of inspiration for manipulating physical presences into an array of compulsive visual arrangements. "Potential energy," using Goodman's words, best sums up the aims of his paintings. Individual components situated in radical perspective in the midst of eliminative masses give way to "violent spatial shifting." Jon Manteau is subsumed by the art that has shaped his personal aesthetic, which paradoxically is polyglotened. Manteau's paintings speak of other paintings and the different modes abstraction has assumed over the course of its development without sentimentality or nostalgia. Manteau's aesthetic is a hybrid discussion of what constitutes the authentic in abstract painting while laying hold to the issue of singularity in a world of difference. Ben Will seeks to disconcert our normal associations of images drawn from cultural memory by displacing them from their original context into biomorphic forms. Will states "I intend to subvert the presence of nostalgia and popular cultural reference points with the inclusion of abstracted forms in the same composition. These forms undermine the images they are paired with by casting doubt on their context.