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Art: Justin Caguiat: Triple Solitaire at Wesleyan
September 17 @ 4:30 pm - 6:00 pm
Tuesday, September 17 – Sunday, December 8, 2024
Tuesday through Sunday, Noon to 5pm
Opening Reception: Sept. 17- 4:30pm to 6pm
Catch the first institutional solo exhibition by artist Justin Caguiat, whose Triple Solitaire immerses the viewer in a theater of perception combining lush abstract paintings and soundworks.
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.
