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Caroline Kent invites us into her multicolored universe. Words by Pia Singh. Photography by Jeff Henrikson
When I ask Caroline Kent about her latest works, her eyes widen, and she launches into a description filled with vivid detail. It’s December and I’m visiting the artist at her home studio, which was painstakingly built over the past three years with her partner in life, and occasionally in work, fellow artist Nate Young. Kent—in her white tennis shoes, brightly colored T-shirt, and perfectly knotted foulard—blends a sportswoman’s dynamism with an effortless Midwestern sangfroid. Her studio is a multicolored universe of cut-out abstract forms taking up every plane and surface. I notice a single tower of scaffolding: “I need to climb up to paint larger surfaces,” she notes, pointing out three tall canvases behind her. We sit down over tea, and Kent dives right into her hometown exhibition, “The Sentimental Hand,” which opens this month at Chicago’s PATRON Gallery. She describes its planning as an “act of
scenography,” a telling choice of words for an artist invested in the histories of filmic space, spatial time, painting, and architecture. Born two hours outside of Chicago in Sterling, Kent pursued her MFA at the University of Minnesota, graduating in 2008. She recalls adopting a practice of intuitive collage-making: “I used to keep these 2 × 3 inch notecard collages, small enough to carry between the pages of a book, in an old cardboard cigar box.” From the back of a drawer in her flat files, she retrieves two graphite-and-crayon drawings on brown paper from her MFA thesis exhibition. A scribbled abstraction in pencil spews yellow, orange, and white wax gestures, a cursive “ck. ch. kc. chk.” extending from the center. On another card, Kent glued a pink unicorn horn to a brown papercut dog head, a scarlet speech bubble spilling from its snout. These early experiments with collage underscore a canny compositional
agility rooted in the artist’s deft understanding of minimal color palettes and limited materials. She casually slides a thin slice of white paper over a scissorcut round on beige linen, demonstrating an intuitive knowledge between hand and element. “My approach is different with each surface I work on,” she reveals. “An antagonism is set up through a hierarchy of placement.” From 2000 to 2002, Kent served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Romania just a decade into the country’s transition out of communism. Unable to speak Romanian, the artist was led to question how a person situates themselves “outside of language” while in the context of the unfamiliar. With the street signs and billboards around her reduced to pure form, textual meaning became arbitrary. She determined to no longer treat the content of her work as enacting translation; instead, the medium itself—be it paper, painting, or print—would do
the transmitting. “If abstract painting is a kind of visual language, I want to be able to articulate in spaces previously reserved for the literary, the scriptural, and the conversational,” she stresses. “I want my work to function as a language.” Over the past decade, Kent has been building this lexicon through more than 300 works in acrylic on black paper, each 22 × 30 inches, that index gestures, compositions, and forms. “Within each arrangement, every shape takes on a different meaning,” she explains. In one study on her mood board, an inverted light-blue triangle balances atop a bright-red trapezoid: at its right edge floats a sky-blue funnel with a long arm stretched out; on the left is an identically colored diamond; across the entire composition rain down tiny blue fragments. In the 2019 exhibition “Writing Forms” at Hawthorn Contemporary, several paintings on paper were outfitted with booth-like frames, encouraging
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