Jordan Kasey’s Whimsical “Exoplanet” at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery
Jordan Kasey exhibits six new large-scale paintings, encircling and filling the space with
visions of whimsy. “Exoplanet,” at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in Soho, permits the viewer to
enter Kasey’s paintings, which seem extracted from a different world. The light within each
painting emulates unnatural tones and shadows that exist under a source of light unfamiliar
in terms of planetary sensibility.
Installation Image of Jordan Kasey’s Exoplanet courtesy of the Artist and Nicelle Beauchene Gallery
A white light illuminates a poolside, crisply accentuating a shadow cast on a beige pavement
by a red hand; a red and turquoise light saturate a dinner table, the view downward on only
one guest, their skin and hair also saturated by the light. With gray dominating much of the
canvas space, as an object casts a colored shadow, the stark lighting and brilliance
surrounding leads me to imagine the rest of the environment in chrome and under a
scintillating white sun. Yet, I find something uncanny about these places. What is this
alternate reality and why are we going there? Regardless, in an in-between place, I feel at a
distance from the world I’m physically in and still separate from the world Kasey depicts.
Installation Image of Jordan Kasey’s Exoplanet courtesy of the Artist and Nicelle Beauchene Gallery
The paintings’ edges barely contain entire bodies, entering the picture plane showing all but
the right or left side of the body, no head, half of a face, or only a face, whose massiveness
arrest me and leave me feeling almost miniature. The scale of these figures and the canvas
push me farther out of reality into a realm where I encounter scenes that resonate with real
life, but I must have only seen them in a dream. A single paint stroke captures the realness
of a toenail or a blade of grass, but also impossibly molds a head without any concavity for
an eyeball to be set in, sitting instead like stickers on a flat surface. The dimensionality of the
objects that populate the scenes render these flat planes into dense dreamscapes, where
impossibly lit figures and structures depict everyday activities to be more complex and
dense; these engorged moments mirroring memories of dreams.