Last August, Mr. Ocean released a pair of albums, “Endless” and “Blonde,” which broke a four-year silence. Until this month, he had not performed in this country for three years; his show on Friday headlining the first night of Panorama, a festival in its second year on Randalls Island, was only his second American concert of the year — and as of now, his last.

But really he was leading a grand-scale meditation on feelings and politics, often overlapping, in the most quiet way possible. The night sky above was lightly purple, and Mr. Ocean’s hair was dyed an ice-pack blue. He was wearing a T-shirt that asked, in all capital letters, “Why be racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic when you could just be quiet?”

He sang beautifully and also nonchalantly — as shows of this size go, the performance was astonishingly quiet. He stuck largely to his recent albums, in arrangements that at times felt gestural. “Solo,” which began the set, was firm and urgent, and “Nikes,” which ended it, was seductively sleepy-eyed. In between, he made room for indignation (the “Poolside Convo” intro to “Self Control”), plangent nostalgia (“Nights”) and asking the crowd to access “the mental energy to go back to that awful painful place like I have to when I’m up here,” before singing the sweetly anguished “Ivy.”

Though he occasionally sauntered back to the main stage, he mostly sang on a circular platform, maybe 15 feet in diameter and about 50 feet into the crowd, where he was surrounded by musical equipment and a handful of beautifully designed chairs. These sometimes held members of his band, who picked at their instruments the way laconic teenagers pick at vegetables, just enough to make it clear they’re paying attention.

Mr. Ocean moved constantly, but rarely in relation to the crowd — everything had the air of improvisation, the do-it-yourself feel of a warehouse show or an experimental-music room.