Catherine Lentini: Day Vision
Opening reception: Thursday, July 9, 5:30 – 7:00 pm
Abattoir Gallery, Cleveland, OH
Abattoir Gallery is very pleased to present Day Vision, a solo show of geometric abstract paintings by Catherine Lentini. She previously exhibited at the Quarter space in 2023.
In her paintings, Lentini explores the open and closed strategies of geometric abstraction, a mode running throughout global art history, one that assumed greater relevance in the 20th century explored by artists interested in science, philosophy, and political revolution. From the Russian Constructivists early on, to Concrete Abstraction and its tangents in South America of the mid-20th century to Op Art—generated in Cleveland—to “Neo-Geo” of the 1980s New York, these paintings both refer to their antecedents while forging new ground.
Lentini explores geometric form in series, but color is always at the heart of the work. These untitled paintings nevertheless are identified by the dominant pigment as the subject, calling attention to materials as central to meaning. Despite the uninflected repetitive form building, these paintings still find touchpoints in our present, asserting emotional chords through color progression, asserting weight or weightlessness in the delicate ladders of form-building.
Alex Vlasov, whose text accompanies the exhibition, adds:
The repetitive hard-edge language of grids, geometric forms, and gradients of Catherine Lentini’s paintings...evoke variations that reveal ideas. The viewer’s understanding of these paintings shifts as they move through the space. Up close, the paintings are reductive, as an analysis of the physical limits of painting. But limitations generate the conditions for possibilities. The permutations of spatial structures articulated in alluring colors create moments of pleasure in thinking and looking.
In Night Vision III, Lentini doesn’t play tricks but rather suggests depth through her lexicon of repeated structures. The geometric shapes intrude upon each other as a tactical gambit. Everything is moving, and all the components are positioned into a non-hierarchical relation. The only thing that is set to stand out is the black-and-white circle in the bottom-left corner. Even in the collapsing structures and anxieties that come with them, there is always a way out. Checkmate to that instability.
Catherine Lentini is an artist from the Central Coast region of California. She took her BA at Bennington College and her MFA at Kent State University. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Akron Art Museum, OAC Riffe Gallery in Columbus, among others.
