Sub-Rural #49, Caroline Kent

Art language and its framing is an asymmetric consolidation between principal hemispheric archives and their constituent artists and crafters. Place introduces alternative possibilities for visual fluency and it sanctions regional myths, schedules, and texts. Official culture usurps events that thrive haphazardly outside the parameters of the artworld, but they dismiss random images, sound, and dimensions that may have urgency for artists. Art prospects fluctuate in the space between existence and essence as theorized by existentialists regarding processes of invention and identification. Where we construct and write about art lie in stages leading up to fresh linguistic and diagrammatic alliances.

The turmoil of un-aestheticised culture presages artists’ creative essence stage. Only after knowledge-gathering that includes theory, art practice, and pedagogy, etc. are cultivated pictures available to be formed by time and place. Inheriting and unfolding presentness is still a studio imperative even more robust in the current period of cultural ambiguity and technological affectation. Abstract language, like that found in painter Caroline Kent’s exhibition, “The Sentimental Hand,” at Patron Gallery nurtures debate about meaning. Her expansion and interpretation of abstract language and cultural memory, is progressive – a consequence of abridging the universe thematically, and humanistically. While art historians and theorists have done much of the hard work initiating conversations about existence, artists make the chaos redeemable by injecting expanded intelligence vis-a-vis subjectivity and ancestory.

Kent is a Chicago painter who readily acknowledges and deliberates the relationship between official histories, collective dreams, and nation. She juggles studio proficiencies like collage, grids, and pastiche that collide with the protracted ordinariness and obscured publics adrift in the real. Avant-garde practice that underscores a linguistic nature of picture-making such as semiotics and abstraction as meta-architecture, are key elements of her paintings. A fragmented signature of suspended symbols spirited paint profiles, and select materials build a rhythm of formal consciousness and texture edge to edge.

Kent’s art is adjacent to Chicago’s substantial body of outlier, neo-vernacularist, and symbolically innovative abstract painting. Related threads of folk and craft-conscious morphologies, have been encouraged in the city’s art academies for decades. The artist teaches at Northwestern where art-funk still provides a soft landing between art-vogue and art-data. It’s a place where artists can position themselves comfortably on a scale of contemporaneity between the global and para-autonomous.

The exhibition’s largest and most powerful painting, “Her Left Hand Spoken Voraciously, While Her Hand Tucked In Her Pocket,” is a brooding autumnal composition. It bridges enlarged fragments of backlit pastel details with broken outlines that drizzle glimpses of planar luminescence. Overlapping cutouts fold mechanical afterimages onto sea-green graphs and shades of organic sediment. Shapes envelop the space like animated ruin fragments, missing dream furniture, and fictive wildlife. They pop anxiously like a Stuart Davis’s letterform composition swayed slightly by a spatial fidelity to a 60’s era formalism. Symbols flux everywhere between banal and extraordinary in imperfectly adjusted intervals. They reside in a mostly downbeat, subtly appointed, composition of secondary colors in the grammatically and psychologically suitable, folk/surrealist space.

“Staying Attuned To Darkness” is a smaller acrylic composition on paper that’s more uncanny than the larger works and constructions. It’s a more condensed encryption contorted to tag mannered silhouettes of alizarin and muted grays. At the top mollusk forms with enchanted guide lights play a lead oceanic role in configuring space.

Current abstract painting is comfortable with both analog  and digital strategies, finessed by place and/or veiled narratives. In Kent’s case it’s a reflection of her Mexican ancestry and research. Touch, as much as vision, captures discreet moments of craft tradition and assembly ritual. Imaginary sign fragments and broken tableaux in “The Sentimental Hand,” are the improvisational archeology of a revered nation, though the images are far more about ethnography than emotion.