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Tag: Overduin & Co.
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Pick of the Week: Caitlin Keogh
Overduin & Co.With spring just ahead, we are on the precipice of a momentous transition. Rays of hope are beginning to warm the cold landscape of our world, as they have again and again throughout humanity’s existence. Caitlin Keogh explores this cyclical nature of history (and our position within it) in her new show, “Waxing Year,” on view until April 3rd at Overduin & Co.
Keogh centers her show around the pagan traditions of the Oak King, as identified by Robert Graves’ book The White Goddess. The “waxing year” is the time between spring and autumn equinoxes, during which the Oak King spreads new life and revives the old, peaking in his strength at Midsummer. While Keogh cites a collection of muses, from Piet Mondrian to her therapist, the bulk of her art strongly feature collected and collaged images and items from her studio and previous works.
Keogh channels this pagan vivacity and strength through a series of large, ethereal paintings (Waxing Year 1-7 (2020)) which are linked compositionally in groups of two to three. She fills her works with personal aesthetic references and, with elements painted as if literally tacked onto the canvas, they act as a mood-board for art history and Keogh herself. The works lack a strong grounding in any reality, but occupy an unreal, underground space. With roots hanging down from above, one can even find Persephone and her pomegranates traversing in Hades below the mantle.
But despite the relative chaos of these paintings, there is a vitalizing energy which courses through them. It belies a growing momentum below the surface. As for Mondrian (who himself lies deep below the ground), we can see his influences in the lattice motif which extends across the paintings, uniting together. Are these lattices forming, or dissolving? Are they the building of new connections, or the cage now being torn asunder?
The waxing year is upon us all in just a few days more and Keogh’s “Waxing Year” reminds us not only of the energy waiting to be released when the Oak King presides again, but also the importance of wielding this power to create and heal.
Overduin & Co.
6693 Sunset Blvd., LA, CA, 90028
Thru Apr. 3, 2021; Appointment Only -
Gracie DeVito
Evoking life’s inconstancy, little is certain in Gracie DeVito’s paintings, which seem to shift in the blink of an eye from abstraction to representation and back again. Even the edges of her shaped canvases seem to sway, slump, wiggle and distend as though struggling against the constraints of conventional rectangularity. As you gaze at their surfaces, faint vestiges of imagery pop from networks of brushstrokes, only to vanish and reassemble into new configurations. Some compositions are readily interpreted as scenes—for instance, in Motion Picture Seaweed (all works 2019), dry brushwork against raw canvas suggests looking out from a cove onto a sunny seashore littered with kelp—but inklings of landscapes, faces, foliage and figures remain fugitive, like barely remembered dreams. In an aleatoric method recalling Surrealist techniques, DeVito often paints on cotton rags on which she has previously wiped brushes, allowing imagery to emerge spontaneously from byproducts of pictures already painted. Situationist Hiker (pictured above) appears to have been painted in that way, with brushstrokes layered over delicately incised cloth on panel. The most definite imagery is found in Bookies in the Garden, where two figures appear on the verge of engulfment by a dark nebulous atmosphere.
Overduin & Co.
6693 Sunset Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90028
Show runs through Mar. 28
