Justin Caguiat’s interdisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, sound works, film, printmaking, and photography—utilizing traditional and novel processes which combine obsolete and emerging technologies and techniques.

His large-scale paintings on unstretched canvas or linen often spread out across entire walls. Within them, numinous and dreamlike scenes unfold. Through an alchemical process involving materials such as oil, gouache, chalk, wax, and distemper, they coalesce into detailed, kaleidoscopic compositions. Figurative and graphic imagery drift in and out of legibility. Thermochromic paintings repurpose rudimentary heating systems and microcontrollers to create feedback loops between ambient room temperature and a target temperature, which trigger heat-responsive pigments. These systems-based artworks reveal imagery and shift color as temperatures rise and fall, creating paintings that are in flux.

Films employ narrative in much the same way as painting for Caguiat: story and figure function as scaffolding for an internal logic. The result is a sensorial and hallucinatory motion-picture. The artist’s sound works create a similar effect by blending original scores, digital tracks, and layers of foley mediated through sculptural objects. DIY directional speakers made from umbrellas are suspended which create isolated spaces to hear sound works in the narrow beam beneath them. His lost-cast copper bells ring out mechanized compositions that are in turn used as a framework for prints and paintings. This concern with the totality of the viewer’s experience is central to the artist’s practice and continues into three-dimensional sculptures in materials as diverse as clay, bread, puppetry and theatre stages.

Hard and soft ground etching, drawing, photography, letterpress, chine collé, flat bite toner transfer and screen printing recycle materials from Caguiat’s practice at large, emphasizing the subsumption of process as a generative practice.