Opening Reception: Justin Caguiat’s Triple Solitaire
Tuesday, September 17, 2024 at 4:30pm
Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Main Gallery
Free
Wesleyan students, faculty, and staff can RSVP on WesNest.
Reception from 4:30pm to 6pm.
In Justin Caguiat’s hands, painting is a slow cinema. His work spans a nostalgia for imagery of the past while speculating on possible futures, expressing a duration that brings together multiple temporalities in the present of the gallery. Triple Solitaire is anchored by three large canvases, abstractions that take time to perceive but also index time through their densely-layered compositions. Even the pigment the artist uses marks time—designed to oxidize in response to the environment in which it’s situated. As the painted images themselves transform, sometimes at a rate imperceptible to the human eye, sound works by the artist suspended from the ceiling immerse the viewer in a different rhythm, a soundtrack to the experience of seeing that itself conditions the viewing experience.
Caguiat’s practice extends across different mediums—painting, sculpture, film, poetry, and sound—and draws on a variety of references to the aesthetics and affective memory of his youth growing up in 1990s Tokyo. At the same time the artist also leans into abstraction. For Caguiat, it is more interesting how his works accrete or defer meaning rather than how they resolve in fixed or knowable images. Similarly, the paintings installed in Triple Solitaire do not assert a sense of fixity or objecthood. They are presented on unstretched canvases inside frames, leaving exposed the textiles’ edges.
The three large abstract paintings installed along the three recessed walls of Zilkha’s Main Gallery comprise a triptych, a singular panoramic work. The panorama, a type of painting popular in Europe and the United States in the 19th century, once presented audiences with the possibility of an immersive viewing experience where the distinction between image and reality could be blurred. As a means of instantly transporting the viewer into an imaginary world, the panorama is a technology of seeing bound up with fantasizing other, different worlds that hold the potential to be both violent and utopian. In making these paintings, Caguiat was particularly interested in “locality paradox,” a phenomenon associated with the panorama wherein a viewer loses awareness of their actual location. How might this experience be altered with a non-representational panorama? Further disrupting the panoramic function of his imagery, Caguiat’s triptych is divided by the gallery’s limestone buttresses as they intersect the white walls.
The exhibition is on display through Sunday, December 8, 2024. The exhibition will be closed from Saturday, October 19 through Tuesday, October 22, 2024; and from Tuesday, November 26 through Monday, December 2, 2024. Learn more about the exhibition.
Justin Caguiat (b. 1989, Tokyo) lives and works between New York and California. Recent solo exhibitions include Greene Naftali, New York (2022); The Warehouse, Dallas (2022); Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo (2021); Modern Art, London (2023, 2020); and 15 Orient, New York (2018). Significant group shows include Modern Art, London (2023, 2021); Lomex, New York hosted by Arcadia Missa, London (2020); and Clima, Milan (2019). Caguiat is a published poet and has participated in various readings and performances, including in 2017 at the Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland. His work is in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; among others.
Triple Solitaire is Justin Caguiat’s first institutional solo exhibition.