Romer Young Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Wielding instinct, a solo exhibition of paintings by Virginia based artist Hampton Boyer. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, September 23rd, from 6-8pm. In conjunction with Nexus Bay Area Black Art Week 2026, there will also be a walkthrough of the exhibition on Wednesday evening, September 30th, from 6-8pm.

Inspired and influenced by African folklore, literature, his love for music, and his own life experiences, Boyer's paintings offer up a ‘place for dreams.’ They pay homage to the parts of himself that are instinctive and curious. In such, the bright, vibrant compositions are beautifully complex in texture and composition. Wielding instinct evokes feelings rather than conjuring images, and “holds conversation and wonder with all those who encounter the work.”

Over the years, Boyer’s work has changed and evolved from the whimsical anthropomorphic, to depictions of the black body, to more abstract compositions. In many ways, this recent work marks an intentful shift from the more literal, towards a more intuitive and instinctive approach that reflects the artist’s own personal human experience. The result is a series of paintings that are the visual, sensory and emotional impressions of the world around him and that ‘capture the raw emotion the artist feels daily.’

While the paintings fluctuate between landscape and abstraction, there is a sense of landscape that pervades even the purest of his abstractions. “Allowing the first mark to be led by intuition makes way for the following marks to exist only out of forging into the future.” The larger landscapes create a playground for the genesis of the next abstractions. Fully submerged and encompassed by shapes and colors, there is no top or bottom. The space Boyer creates has no gravity and movement between microcosm and macrocosm is fluid. The artist’s color palette is unique and dramatic. Boyer moves between bright, keyed up color fields to calmer, more subdued and cool colors. Together, the paintings hold tensions that invite deep viewing, and simultaneously evoke a luminosity and a wistfulness. They represent moments in time – interruptions, glimmers, snapshots– on his journey of fatherhood, and the playfulness that follows when the artist enters a flow state.