".mes ntal imagery comes into play with Caguiat's abstractions, inviting viewers to bask in dreamlike canvases whose scale and dusky tones approximates them to frescoes.”
Rich earth tonalities swirl and blend in a dreamlike scene of amorphous abstraction and emergent figuration in The saint is never busy from 2019, an exemplary representation of Justin Caguiat’s exploration of imagination, dreams, and memory. Monumental in scale, the present work invites the viewer into its sublime constellation of textures and forms upon an unstretched, frayed canvas, engulfing the viewer in an otherworldly realm that is at once recognizable and mysterious. In recent years, Oakland and New York-based Justin Caguiat has come to critical attention for his paintings that straddle the liminality between fiction and reality to investigate t.mes less themes of art history and personal memory. Drawing from vast stretches of art historical iconography, The saint is never busy seamlessly integrates the evolving lineages of abstraction and geometry, from Japanese Ukiyo-e through to Viennese Secession and even futuristic science fiction, all in wholly contemporary gestures. Testifying to its significance within Caguiat’s rising career, The saint is never busy was a centerpiece of the artist’s second solo gallery exhibition, Permutation City 1999 at Modern Art, London in 2020, which presented a series of paintings inspired by a fictional narrative that the artist wrote. Represented by Greene Naftali Gallery in New York, Caguiat recently exhibited with his first museum presentation at the The Warehouse, Dallas in 2022, and other examples of his works reside in the collects ions of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Dallas Museum of Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others.
The saint is never busy belongs to a series that Caguiat produced for his 2022 exhibition Permutation City 1999 at Modern Art, London, which accompanies a text written by the artist that forms the foundational basis for the paintings. In his narrative, Caguiat recounts a story of his family fleeing from New York during the pandemic outbreak of COVID-19 to Berkeley, California, where he checked into a youth hostel owned by an art collects or. It was here, in one of the rooms, that Caguiat found an unsigned journal filled with poems, prose, and drawings hidden between the bedframe and the wall – its content would form the basis of his work over the next three years, the drawings used as sketches and overlapping composites, and the poetic excerpts the basis and titles of his paintings. Entitled and inspired by one of these poems, A saint is never busy sees Caguiat’s painterly interpretation of a family’s relationship as memories are forgotten, twisted, and relived. Painting on unstretched canvas that has been pinned to the frame and frayed at the sides, Caguiat conjures an intimate yet billowing interface for this imagined world in The saint is never busy. Drifting in and out of legibility, figures and faces materialize like ethereal phantoms. Caguiat displays his sweeping command of painterly gestures in the present work, his hand fluidly moving between soft and hard lines; mixed and bold colors; flat and textured surfaces that altogether spill across the canvas and cascade into a kaleidoscopic haze.
"I cry because he’s dying, now he’s dust an older shade of green across my eyes turns to red dust of the heart. now how to keep out of hell are the wheels that are turning, he used to be so violent but now so enfeebled yet / His eye still holds violence, his other eye is blind and / He has to wear a diaper."
In The saint is never busy, layers of aqueous green ground surround a central yellow oculus, with its oval perimeter tightly bound by the rectangular edges of the canvas. This orb encapsulates the central scenes that Caguiat has embedded within the painting, a flurry of pigment and dashes of figuration that only reveal themselves as the pastose surface transfixes the viewer. Like foggy bits of recollects ion upon waking up from a dream, limbs and faces slowly emerge from the psychedelic swathes of mauve, ochre, green and purple: two female faces appear to loom over an opposing male figure, and and needle-like black legs arch back to propel an indecipherable body of antennae forward. “Rich yet muted tones contain pointillist patterns and organic forms, their stylistic references ranging from Symbolism to the Viennese Secession, a school of painting informed by Art Nouveau, with Gustav Klimt at the helm,” continues Tessa Moldan. (Tessa Moldan, “Justin Caguiat Blends Paint and Memory,” Ocula, 25 June 2020 (online)) In the present work, Caguiat’s figuration indeed recalls the Symbolist masters Gustav Klimt and Odilon Redon, while the red figure resembles Japanese Manga iconography and the black-legged creature harkens to Surrealist fantasies.
“Rich yet muted tones contain pointillist patterns and organic forms, their stylistic references ranging from Symbolism to the Viennese Secession, a school of painting informed by Art Nouveau, with Gustav Klimt at the helm.”
Within the spellbinding painterly terrain of The saint is never busy, newfound forms appear one after the other with promise of new revelation. In this way, Caguiat’s resplendent motifs coalesce in an alluring and enigmatic composite body that is always in flux, a fictitious, billowing landscape that reveals space unbound.
