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拍品专文
Dreampop (2023), a monumental, mural-like palimpsest of oil, gouache and chalk on linen over three metres wide, exemplifies the unique painterly language of Justin Caguiat. It finds its place in the gaps between things: figuration and abstraction; waking and dreaming; East and West; ancient and modern. Engulfed by a field of luminous orange, spheres, tendrils, spirals, and spheres swirl and interact in a patchwork of colour and form. Translucent spheres float and shimmer. Patterns recalling stained glass emerge and recede, remaining just out of reach. The vast, layered surface hangs unstretched, like a tapestry, in an artist’s frame.
Born in 1989 in Tokyo, Caguiat lived in Yokohama, Hong Kong, Jakarta and Manila (through his grandmother, he has Filipino heritage) before travelling to North America, where he continued his peripatetic lifestyle. As his friend, the artist and writer Thomas Killian Roach, has pointed out, Caguiat can be considered among what the sociologist Ruth Useem termed ‘third-culture kids’—‘those raised abroad during their developmental years, most of whom grew up with no fixed or stable identity’ (T. Killian Roach, exhibition text for Dreampop, Modern Art, London, 2023). His paintings are similarly rootless, insisting on the same state of being in the viewer: the eye cannot rest, but must wander eternally.
Caguiat’s paintings have become fixtures of museum collections across the United States, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He has cited the Nabis as a major influence, and in its broad, seeping fields of colour, unsettling any sense of perspective, Dreampop calls to mind the late work of Pierre Bonnard. Further imaginative elements include the jewel-like fantasies of Klimt’s Vienna School and Japanese ukiyo-e or manga; his works’ textures and hues (not to mention their colossal scale) also recall medieval wall-paintings. A published poet, Caguiat is scrupulous with his titles—with the order imposed by language upon the enigmatic workings of the image. Dreampop calls to mind the neo-psychedelic musical genre also known as shoegaze, with its densely textural sound-worlds in which melody is all but submerged: an apt analogy for the experience afforded by Caguiat’s sumptuous, secretive paintings.
Born in 1989 in Tokyo, Caguiat lived in Yokohama, Hong Kong, Jakarta and Manila (through his grandmother, he has Filipino heritage) before travelling to North America, where he continued his peripatetic lifestyle. As his friend, the artist and writer Thomas Killian Roach, has pointed out, Caguiat can be considered among what the sociologist Ruth Useem termed ‘third-culture kids’—‘those raised abroad during their developmental years, most of whom grew up with no fixed or stable identity’ (T. Killian Roach, exhibition text for Dreampop, Modern Art, London, 2023). His paintings are similarly rootless, insisting on the same state of being in the viewer: the eye cannot rest, but must wander eternally.
Caguiat’s paintings have become fixtures of museum collections across the United States, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He has cited the Nabis as a major influence, and in its broad, seeping fields of colour, unsettling any sense of perspective, Dreampop calls to mind the late work of Pierre Bonnard. Further imaginative elements include the jewel-like fantasies of Klimt’s Vienna School and Japanese ukiyo-e or manga; his works’ textures and hues (not to mention their colossal scale) also recall medieval wall-paintings. A published poet, Caguiat is scrupulous with his titles—with the order imposed by language upon the enigmatic workings of the image. Dreampop calls to mind the neo-psychedelic musical genre also known as shoegaze, with its densely textural sound-worlds in which melody is all but submerged: an apt analogy for the experience afforded by Caguiat’s sumptuous, secretive paintings.