jonathan casella
Happy Monday from the backroom!
A big thank you to Katie Behel for gifting us a large pedestal/storage box. It was a great excuse to move pieces around on the walls and reveal yet another version of the backroom gallery. More information about older pieces can be found on our "COLLECTING" page.
Portland’s got a new great art crit blog! Take a look at Sam Hopple’s review of our current show on 60 Inch Center.
The buzz continues for our current exhibition, Everything We Ever Wanted… Congrats to Jonathan Casella for his feature on SightUnseen this weekend.
“Unlike a traditional bottle, bowl, and fruit motif, the objects of the still lifes in Everything We Ever Wanted lend a degree of specificity that suggest unique personality—the tableaus are alive with vibrant individuality. Wearing similar palettes and styles, the paintings appear that they might be of the same social circle, happily coexisting in the gallery. There is a casual and good humored tone to their rapport as they rest comfortably among patterned linens, enjoy a snack, and leaf leisurely through the pages of Artforum. But as casual as the mood might be, the show is absolutely worth taking seriously. The trio of artists create richly layered works that build and reveal, grow and shift, creating an ever changing viewing experience that seeks to offer everything you ever wanted, and comes close at least for a time.”
Read the full review HERE
On Monday, Nationale’s new show, Everything We Ever Wanted, was extended through July 6, and it’s easy to see why. Though the show’s promotional materials tout an interest in the divide between what Lana Del Rey would call “the real and the fehhhhhhhk,” it’s also got echoes of post-net art, and brings an explosion of color to the shop/gallery’s tidy, white box.
There are Sarah Mikenis’ paintings of grouped, unidentifiable objects—they’re weird homunculi in gorgeous jewel tones, like an army of .gifs invading our tangible, 3-d plane. Jonathan Cassella’s works in acrylic do something similar: They’re paintings, but so heavily textured they read as collage. I checked with Nationale’s Gabi Lewton-Leopold: They’re not. It’s a delightful trick of the eye writ in broad gestures, and the color scheme you’d expect from a D.A.R.E. t-shirt ca. 1994, not precise cross-hatching behind swathes of paint.
Then there are Katie Batten’s paintings—perfect, picture book-illo assemblages that are like acid-hued I Spys for the digital age. They’re like getting to see inside a stranger’s browser history, if that stranger was more into lifestyle porn than porn-porn. I spy: Goldfish in a bowl cribbed straight from Matisse. I spy: a slice of pizza, a nod to snackwave, the web-based snack-food obsession the Hairpin’s dubbed “the internet’s saltiest meme.” I spy: Artforum. I spy: A Dutch-blue-painted flowerpot. In another one of her paintings, Batten zooms in on what reads as the top of a dresser piled with a sliced geode, a BFF necklace, a crucifix. The Tumblr teen girl aesthetic is one of my favorite trends in contemporary art right now, and it’s very much present in this painting, in objects so strongly associated with a particular age (adolescence) and a particular time (mid-‘90s?).
Batten’s paintings are, for the most part, the show’s only plainly representational pieces. Though Mikenis’ appear to have been painted from tricked-out still lifes, they read as abstractions. They’re fascinating. But they evade categorization. Meanwhile, Battens’ paintings are all about categorization. They’re invested in objects. And with their impossibly bright colors and smooth lines, they manage to be both cartoonish and very clean. I want to hang out in a room with 500 of them.
Everything We Ever Wanted is a shot in the arm. It’s a burst of color without being a mess, an onslaught of references you don’t necessarily need to understand. It’s as bright as you want, and then some.
Jonathan Casella, The Fizz, 2015, acrylic on panel, 30.5 x 24”
Jonathan Casella, What’s After the Great Escape? Loneliness and Something Else…, 2015, acrylic on panel, 30.5 x 24”
Jonathan Casella, Once Hidden in Time, Twice Forgotten Until Found Near the Pressed Flowers, 2015, acrylic on panel, 13 x 10”
Jonathan Casella, A Benevolent One, but Anyone Who Understands This Vault Wasn’t Made Pinching Pennies, 2015, acrylic on panel, 13 x 10"
Jonathan Casella, Jewish Girl from Florida. Her Nose., 2015, acrylic on panel, 14 x 10 1/2”
Jonathan Casella, The Drive Saw Palm Trees (right), 2015, acrylic on panel, 17 x 15”
BIO
Jonathan Casella is a Texas born painter now living in Portland, OR. He’s studied art in San Francisco and has shown at CAMH in Houston, the Luggage Store in San Francisco, Galerie C.O.A. in Montréal, QC, and in various pop-ups set up in New York hotel rooms.
