CARLOS CABALLERO

The pictorial space deployed in Caballero’s paintings is at once vast and self-contained, it unfolds within the confines of the canvas. Oscillating between quasi formalist grid systems, seemingly expressionistic symbols, and geometric shapes, his approach to painting is slow and reflective, but also punctuated by more painterly moments that come to disrupt the original tempo. His use of schematic forms meticulously brushed onto the canvas lend his work the graphic quality of some indecipherable instruction manual. By exerting this process of perpetual doing and undoing, composition and decomposition, his paintings tend to escape traditional categorisations to expose their own internal logic.

While it could appear to bear some of the seriousness of modernist abstraction, Caballero’s work displays a more playful aspect. At times, the spatial arrangements and configurations taking place on a flat and monochromatic plane can resemble the slow-moving shapes of early electronic games or computer graphics. The various elements that construct each one of his paintings can in turn be seen as set of arcane tools, blank objects and abstruse diagrams, waiting to be excavated one layer at a time, time after time.