Marquez Art Projects is proud to present “Off to nearly everywhere,” the first US solo presentation for Slovenia-born, London-based artist Katarina Caserman. The exhibition comprises a suite of newly commissioned works that expand upon the artist’s recent contributions to abstraction.
Allover in composition and charged in tone and attitude, Caserman’s paintings are fields of connectivity awash in sublime color and rapid speed. Smoke, webs, tectonics, architecture and, especially, close-ups of base materiality all come to mind: These paintings, which range in scale, comprise a series of gestures whose rhythmic application of paint result in illusionistic images that move the viewer’s eye both across and into the canvas.
Caserman’s paintings derive from through an automatic process that seeks to create materiality of the intangible. Marks collect into declaratively abstract compositions that evoke their process, yet nonetheless suggest anthropomorphism as they distort the flatness of the canvas and manipulate the viewer’s perception of scale. Each of Caserman’s decisively stylized canvases features a restricted color palette that cites the monochrome tradition while rejecting any notion of purity or spirituality.
Instead, Caserman’s ambient and immersive worlds cite a dynamic constellation of references, from the microscopic observations of petri dishes to the macro-worlds of science fiction and borrowing from popular illustration and cinema and the metaphysics of surrealism. The endless cascade of nodes in Caserman’s paintings evokes cybernetics, and calls met and unmet for connectivity and collectivity. This interest is further emphasized by echoes of Surrealist automatic drawing. Caserman’s paintings describe and embody networks whose flows course energetically, and demand the unpacking of intense psychological drives and potentials.
