JUSTIN CAGUIAT
Triple Solitaire

Sep 17 – Dec 8, 2024
Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University | Main Gallery

Opening Tues, Sep 17 | 4:30 – 6 PM

Caguiat’s first institutional solo exhibition engulfs the viewer in a theater of perception.

Three large abstract paintings installed along the recessed walls of Zilkha’s Main Gallery can be experienced together as a panoramic landscape. The panorama, a European genre popularized in the 19th century, once presented audiences with the possibility of an immersive viewing experience, blurring the distinction between image and reality. As a means of instantly transporting the viewer into an imaginary world, the panorama is a technology of seeing bound up with fantasizing other worlds that hold the potential to be both violent and utopian. In making these paintings, Caguiat considered the “locality paradox,” a phenomenon associated with the panorama wherein a viewer loses awareness of their actual location.

Caguiat’s practice draws on a vast variety of references to the aesthetics and affective memory of his youth growing up in 1990s Tokyo. For Caguiat, it is more interesting how his works accrete or defer meaning rather than how they resolve in fixed or knowable images. Even the pigment the artist uses marks time—designed to oxidize in response to the environment in which it’s situated. As the painted images themselves transform, sometimes at a rate imperceptible to the human eye, sound works by the artist suspended from the ceiling immerse the viewer in a different rhythm: a soundtrack to the experience of seeing that itself conditions the viewing experience.

More information is available on the exhibition's website.