JUSTIN CAGUIAT

Justin Caguiat’s numinous, dreamlike paintings depict realms beyond the visible. Figures and other lifeforms stir and recede into aqueous grounds of patterned color, which appear to overspill the bounds of unstretched sheets of linen or canvas. His work’s layered atmospherics reflect the Symbolist inheritance of fin-de-siècle eccentrics like Odilon Redon, who also turned to sources of enchantment and mystery in an era of rampant capitalism. Though unmistakably contemporary, Caguiat’s paintings draw on a mix of aesthetic traditions, from Vuillard’s wallpapered interiors to the Vienna School’s jewel-box modernism, to the flattened forms of Japanese woodblock prints, mosaics and Manga imagery. Ornate but never ornamental, his work creates its own reality, through inner landscapes that drift between the observed and the imagined.