Artist: Aline Cautis
Exhibition title: Searchers
Venue: SABOT, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Date: June 1 – July 14, 2018
Photography: YAP Studio / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and SABOT, Cluj-Napoca
A woman begins to drift into a daydream state: figures appear dancing in the fields. Biting, yelping, growling, then silent.
The point of departure for this show is the artist’s imagining of her journey with her family to find pieces of family history disconnected when her parents escaped Romania in the 1970’s. As a first-generation American, one switches back and forth between two cultures and two languages; this journey is shared by many. It is a dream of searching without finding a fixed space. The artist paints within this space of dislocation. From this abstraction, a figure of a wandering dog forms like some fairytale figure (the stray).
The woman is slowly falling asleep in a chair. Taken from riffs of the sleeping figures in a Cassatt or Morisot studies. As the typical object of paintings, here she is the main character. The woman dreams; her dreams search for something unknown.
If all the dogs of painted history wandered off their surfaces, stood laughing, daydreaming, journeying. They are all there in nooks and crannies of paintings across history.
The moments between sleep and wakefulness, figuration and abstraction, line and color, reverb against each other, slowly taking form. Absentmindedly applied paint in amorphous shapes of saccharine thinned out colors vibrate and take shape and form into these listless anthropomorphic travelers. Avoidance and Indulgence…
Sentiment and pathos string along the revolving emotional landscape, shifting from pastoral to urban to interior space and exterior. Only one interior pictures a comfortable domestic bourgeois dog and setting. This dog has everything it could ever dream of, yet the dream searches on… (dogs playing cards). A modern satirical folktale overlaps itself as if they’ve all been revisited by the same ekphrastic mastermind.
Searchers is the third solo show by Aline Cautis at SABOT. Aline Cautis (1975) lives and works in Los Angeles.
