Operating System: Jeremy Flick, Paola Oxoa, Alex Puz, and Michael Scott

Washington, D.C

PFA is pleased to announce Operating System, an exhibition featuring works by Jeremy Flick, Paola Oxoa, Alex Puz, and Michael Scott. The exhibition will be on view in Washington D.C., at 1932 9th Street NW (enter from 9 ½ Street) from November 8th, 2025, through December 20th, 2025. An opening reception will take place on November 8th, from 5 to 7 PM.

Operating System brings together four distinct artists engaging abstraction as a vehicle to probe unconscious dimensions of perception. Displaying a high level of conceptual integrity, they each work with a condensed visual language grounded in foundational components, such as line, color, and form. These restrained architectures, or operating systems, allow the artists to communicate directly with viewers on a purely instinctive, sensorial level.

Within this exhibition, underlying structure is brought to the fore, posited as both the intellectual and emotional core of any work. Absorbing this logic generates embodied contemplation, externalizing internal affective experience by connecting directly with the body’s perceptual centers. Consequently, the assembled artists are each highly sensitive to the weight of their formal decisions. Investigating the impacts of proximity on perception, Puz implicates complementary colors, exploring how their interaction catalyzes acute shifts in figure and ground. Scott views his foray into sculpture, presented here, as an extension of the systematic painting he began in the 1980s. Here, the solid, vertical form serves to augment the paintings’ inherent physicality. Flick’s break with the traditional rectangular form similarly reflects his interest in the phenomenological aspect of painting. Through the rectangular frame, Oxoa invokes the pictorial logic of landscape, abstracting its form into a vessel for the transmission of energetic information. The artists find resonance in the rhythm of repetition, maintaining a delicate balance between a systemized approach to making and the introduction of subtle shifts which deepen the visual encounter. In Flick’s compositions, moments of tension, slippage, and release are sought in the serendipitous collision of slanted geometric shapes. Likewise, Oxoa’s rippling waves and sharp, exacting lines communicate through a language at once personal and universal, expressing the artist’s attunement to environmental stimuli. Conversely, Scott and Puz seek integrity in adherence to pattern, activating an optical response which distorts the bodily relationship to space. Altogether, the artists demonstrate an awareness that in revealing a sharply articulated formal logic, perceptivity is heightened rather than inhibited.

The title Operating System alludes not only to the finely abstract systems which underpin the assembled artist’s creative processes, but to the digital landscape characteristic of our time. The capacity of language to operate as an entirely non-verbal phenomenon is explored in depth here, referencing historical theories of abstraction concerned predominantly with the generative possibilities of form and structure. These dialogues find novel resonance in an era of technological overload, where digital images dominate perceptual experience. Informed by our predominantly digital environment, Flick, Oxoa, Puz, and Scott meditate on the elements that reverberate at the base of our consciousness, subtly stimulating our discernment of and interaction with our surroundings. In this way, they display commendable dexterity, transmitting visual messages in terms equally candid as they are complex.