Jordan Kasey at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery

Artist: Jordan Kasey

Exhibition title: The Storm

Venue: Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, US

Date: February 25 – March 27, 2021

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to present The Storm, Jordan Kasey’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.

In The Storm, Jordan Kasey brews a gale of melodrama, intrigue, levity, and darkness across eight, large-scale paintings. Here we find the artist’s characteristically stone-like, colossal figures in surreal moments that belie ascribable notions of time and reality, each one bound up in unraveling psychological narratives. Isolation—a feeling often explored by the artist—brims throughout The Storm perhaps more so than ever before. Yet while Kasey’s anonymous figures appear alone within the frame of their paintings, signs indicate the presence of other forces (the shadow of a ghost, the clasp of helping hands, a car’s blaring headlights). Only one painting—Dance Party (2021)—comprises a group: a pulsing kaleidoscope of bodies, colors, and abandon.

The vibrant dreamscapes in which Kasey’s figures find themselves unite interior and exterior planes, serving as windows into varying mental states. Weather steers all feeling in The Storm: thick globs of rain and the steam from a coffee cup fully encase the central figure in Umbrella (2021). In another scene, Summer Evening (2019), heat is sensed from the radiating, dimming sunset far off through the portal of a window while a figure cools off in shadow. As a force of action and change, as well as a psychological litmus, weather for Kasey helps bridge the physical and mental dissonances of one’s emotions. Lightning cracks and the drapes blow in; eyes shoot open, gripped by insomnia below an aurora borealis; a body levitates, inching towards an open door and black, starlit sky.

Kasey is equally invested in playing with painting as a medium to broaden our language for experiencing color, light, and space within images. Recently, the artist has articulated this experimentation by building planes of highly varied texture. Surfaces—like that of an armchair, pants and socks, a blanket or a halter top—are delineated through impasto and the continuous, deliberate layering of paint. In Storm (2020) and Trust (2021), Kasey draws directly into the layers with the tip of a palette knife, carving patterns into the canvas. Juxtaposed with areas of thinner brushwork, the artist’s textures charge each painting with a distinct energy and lush dimensionality.

Jordan Kasey (b. 1985) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Kasey has exhibited work at Loyal Gallery, Stockholm (2020, 2018); Capsule, Shanghai (2019); Carl Kostyál, Malmö (2019); Signal Gallery, Brooklyn (2018, 2016); Kate MacGarry, London (2018); MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2017); White Cube, London (2017); and Greenpoint Terminal Gallery, Brooklyn (2016), among others. Her works can be found in the Collezione Marimotti, Italy and the Zabludowicz Collection, London.