Justin Caguiat “Carnival”

Greene Naftali Gallery

[Image: Justin Caguiat "Gretel in Pharmakon" (2022) Oil and gouache on linen, artist frame, Painting: 132 x 125 in.]

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Ground Floor

Greene Naftali presents its first solo exhibition by Justin Caguiat (b. 1989, Tokyo, lives and works between New York and Oakland, California). Carnival shares its title with one of Caguiat’s impressionistic and haunting early videos, which debuts here alongside a selection of his latest paintings. The artist’s numinous, dreamlike works depict realms beyond the visible. Intimately rendered at a towering scale on unstretched linen, Caguiat’s dense surfaces metabolize a range of sources: from manga imagery to Filipino devotional art to century-old Japanese erotica, and the jewel-box modernism of Symbolist painters or the Vienna Secession. A certain opulence or visual hedonism results from that mix of registers and cultural ties, creating inner landscapes rooted in a toxic sublime.