Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Caroline Kent
American; 21st-century
Chicago, IL: Smart Museum of Art (Exhibition: Expanding the 50th: Shared Stories)
79%
A postcard that reads: Reading Camus at a bar with a fireplace, and it’s very cold outside. I look out the window and see it’s snowing. Though you are far, I bring you close through every word I read and with each sip I take. 2025. Mixed media installation with objects from the Smart’s collection
Most of the paintings of Kent's I've seen I've found to be a little cute. Solving the problem of cuteness by means of monumentality is a little bit like taking a bath by means of a tanning bed, but hey, if it works it works. And damn, this works. A big part of its working has to do with the fact that the two components of the installation that are traditional "paintings" don't operate formally in quite the same way as the installation in toto, which is a "painting" fundamentally but also somewhat evasively. (The big blue rectangular background holds everything together as if on a common plane, such that any dimensionality has the same effect that impasto would on a painted surface; but still the piece casts shadows...) The colors and the saturation and the geometry and the massing of the two canvases are all congruent with the same features of the installation overall, such that it seems unified across multiple levels. But congruency isn't identity, so there ends up being all these productive little disjuncts that accent the piece's play with medium without beating you over the head with it — the palette of the work on the whole, for instance, is that much richer and heavier than that of the canvases; the shapes in the paintings are that much softer and freer-flowing than those protruding from the wall. (The found-object elements, which are medieval architectural fragments made of stone, act like a go-between: they are hard in substance like the installational components of the work, but soft in their movements like the paintings.) If there's a downside to this work it's that it's a bit treacly when you consider its title; the ease of its colors and its jocund arrangement do not countervail this treacliness. (2025)