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Elsie Kagan’s work fuses painting as a spontaneous, gestural continuation of the body with an approach that suggests the medium’s historical role as arbiter of perceived and idealized realities. Her paintings overlay multiple vantage points that seem to imply dense, open-ended narratives and reveal often-contradictory spatial perspectives.
Recent monumentally scaled oil paintings reference 17th century Italian Baroque art and architecture. They examine the period’s emphasis on grandeur and high emotion, often coupled with religious states of ecstasy. Building up complex imagery that emerges, and suddenly disappears, the application of paint often assumes a distinct identity that recalls various other visual “languages” such as mid-20th century abstract expressionism.
The artist often merges her own biography, interests, and anxieties with the myths, history, and collective identity revealed in aesthetic movements. In so doing, she hints at the potential for painting to transcend any particular moment and to speak to a deeper and more intuitive understanding of the world.
Kagan’s dense and enigmatic images allude to transcendence and mortality, truth and authenticity, corporal experience and control. Intrigue with perceptual magic and the illusion of pictorial space is combined with pure delight in the act of painting, the resultant loss of self-awareness, and a consciousness of the body in action --a reality that is then mirrored in the image being painted.
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