↳ Exhibitions

Justin Caguiat at 15 Orient

November 23, 2018

Artist: Justin Caguiat

Exhibition title: God is a Concept from a Story Come to Life

Venue: 15 Orient, New York, US

Date: October 27 – November 30, 2018

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and 15 Orient, New York

The love is boiling in the Fertile Void; it is souring and fermenting there. The Void must yield up an homunculus. (All this is occurring in the dark, on the yonder side of impasse.) Void! Yield up the homunculus!

The surface of the river was everywhere giving itself to the air. Most of the bright splashes fell back into the river in drops, but the tiniest sparkles passed into the atomies of the air. A dead fish on the rock: the stinking gases were powerfully agitating the little air; and the wings of small fleas (the first of the year) were wildly fanning these gases.

These were the vortices of the gases…they became conscious that they themselves were breathing in and out and were shaking the density with speech…all these were flexible tubes. They were tubes sucking in not only the atmosphere of the environment but nourishment of all kinds and furnishing a through-passage for it. For except in matters of perception it was especially in these interior passages that these tubes came into contact with the environment which was supporting their vitality and growth. The dense atmosphere caressed the tubes around, and also penetrated them through and through; but not, in the interiors, according to the “freedom of the winds,” but the atmosphere was accepted and released according to the tubular rhythms of each kind, so that among the rocks and sitting on the rocks the tubes were bringing far-off environment, as well as being immersed in and out in river vapors.

This then is the theory of the relation of the impasse and the Fertile Void: diminishing error but remaining close in the awareness of the impasse of nothing practical, large increments of Love are released that are fermenting in the Fertile Void.

-Paul Goodman, The Empire City

Justin Caguiat, God is a Concept from a Story Come to Life, 2018, exhibition view, 15 Orient, New York

Justin Caguiat, On The Marionette Theater, 2018 , gouache on linen

Justin Caguiat, God is a Concept from a Story Come to Life, 2018, exhibition view, 15 Orient, New York

Justin Caguiat, A Rat, A Dog, A Boy, 2018, gouache on linen

Justin Caguiat, Life is Heaven, 2018, gouache on linen

Justin Caguiat, God is a Concept from a Story Come to Life, 2018, exhibition view, 15 Orient, New York

Justin Caguiat, The Green Eye of Spring, 2018, gouache on linen

Justin Caguiat, God is a Concept from a Story Come to Life, 2018, exhibition view, 15 Orient, New York

Justin Caguiat, Glissade for Poncet, 2018 , gouache on canvas

Justin Caguiat, Merculet, 2 018, gouache on linen

Justin Caguiat, Untitled, 2018, taxidermied frog

Justin Caguiat (with Shelby Jackson), Obliteration of the Past in the Brightness of the Present Kinesthetic Empathy, 2018 , bread, plaster, latex, wire, Japanese Noh mask, iron bed frame, linen

Justin Caguiat (with Shelby Jackson), Obliteration of the Past in the Brightness of the Present Kinesthetic Empathy, (detail), 2018 , bread, plaster, latex, wire, Japanese Noh mask, iron bed frame, linen