Seeing Joe Bright’s exhibition of oil paintings, “Finding the 9th,” on display in the retail environment of Kakaako’s fishcake design studio, amidst the aromas and hisses of the coffee bar, highlights the scarcity of art galleries in Honolulu and how much local artists have come to rely on wall space provided by cafe and store owners.

While some might prefer this to a traditional gallery’s “white cube,” there is definite value in being able to view a show of paintings without distractions.

Abstract painting in particular, as seen in Bright’s current show, demands attentive effort from the viewer: Instead of immediately recognizable landscapes or figures, one is offered only evocations of familiar shapes or forms, and dynamic interactions between color, line and spaces. In this series, Bright works with quilt-like patterns of vibrating brush strokes, blocks of color whose edges often slip over and under each other, and graphical traces that flirt with the idea of resolving into letters, words or stylized figurations.

Bright’s brushwork is highly energetic, layered and unafraid of a kind of insolent coarseness that prevents the canvases from going stale. Any leanings toward the soothing or neutral that might come from his uses of pastel blues, oranges, greens and purples are disrupted by erupting fissures of intense, darker colors. Other paintings begin at this darker end of the spectrum, creating stormy relationships between patches of brighter hues. In all cases he evokes hand stitching, graffiti-like gestures, almost-ideograms and expressionistic gestures to help define a subtle grid that underlies most of the works.

This grid is, perhaps, the most direct relationship to the music that the exhibition’s title references. Bright’s “Finding the 9th” is not a Disney “Fantasia”-style representation in paint of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. Rather, like music itself, it is a set of explorations of time and change, making full use of the way that the technical term “chromatics” is deployed in both art forms. Sound can behave like color, and the eye (like the ear) rarely rests. Instead it is constantly sampling other regions of the canvas for contrast and complementarity, including a z-axis of depth achieved through a mix of transparencies, layered application of paint and carefully selected colors.

Bright has a theory that the movements of Beethoven’s 9th describe the composer’s autobiographical struggle with the ups and downs of artistic and individual development. Four large canvases (“Ode IV,” “Deep Under III,” “Garden Life II,” and “Origins I”) can be loosely affiliated with the symphony’s four movements, while a collection of small oil-on-paper paintings serve as ancillary means of getting to know Bright’s style. There is definitely a strong emotionality to these works that is challenging without being obscure or off-putting.

This show marks Bright’s first solo painting exhibition in Honolulu, though he has shown work at the Bishop Museum, Gallery Iolani, the Honolulu Museum of Art and thirtyninehotel. Unfortunately, it is difficult to assess the true impact of these works in this context: One wonders, for instance, whether a given canvas attracts or goes less noticed placed above a fancy sofa.

That said, beyond perhaps giving us an exercise in mindfulness, Bright, who also runs Kama‘aina Acupuncture, probably wouldn’t object to someone’s buying one of his colorful, dynamic canvases to go along with some of the furniture and lighting fishcake sells. Product placement can itself be viewed as an expression of the kind of flexible thinking that Bright embeds in all his work.