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Brooklyn-based artist, Caitlin Berndt’s current exhibition at Kate Oh Gallery, “Edge In,” is steeped in an art historical tradition that draws from the abstracted figures and object-studies of American Abstraction’s field paintings, while mediated by the bleeding orphic dyes of Kupka, Léger and Delaunay’s Fauvism. Delicately fettered in this harmony, Berndt’s balance between small-scale gouache paintings and large-scale oil works uncovers the relationship between frayed perception and personal mythos. Domestic indices of organic life—fauna, cacti and Venus flytraps—vacillate between beclouded shadows and fractured materiality, a dialectic practice that reproduces the uncanny process of hallucination, or that which Berndt terms an “acid desert dreamland.” Thus, one such cactus subsumes the sun's flaxen rays, its thorns turned orange, while an inky aquamarine plash swathes the entire canvas.
Despite our postmodern epoch has effaced the cannon of “representational art,” Berndt’s deliberate decision to salvage the markers of post-impressionist domesticity culls the practice of cathartic meditation and retrospection. Redolent of suspended dancers, the florid botany and flickering shadows adoring Berndt’s canvases evoke the process of reassembling cloaked memories. For Berndt, these works are not simply pedagogical studies of relational aesthetics or philosophical encroachments upon the sublime but, instead, recollect the unveiling of everyday life from the recesses of memory.
Berndt’s rhythmic images also recall her artistic process, as her paintings are often the product of threading relics of material culture into an aggregate assemblage. With Edge In, Berndt’s methodology is mildly reminiscent of that of Gerhard Richter, albeit Berndt has no interest in preserving the fold of photorealism: while, like Richter, these paintings were originally conceived of as digital projections, they also trace sculptural studies and intimate reminiscence. In turn, Edge In invites the viewer to disentangle familiar images of romance and quotidian life from their narrative accord.