PATRON is proud to announce Caroline Kent: The Sentimental Hand, our second solo exhibition with the Chicago-based artist. The Sentimental Hand results from a year in which Kent’s focus returned to honing in on the building blocks of her practice, starting with cut paper forms–the elementary facet of her practice. Celebrating the role of the artist’s own hand as foundational in each stage of her creative process, the exhibition unites four bodies of work across which Kent has been concurrently working for the past year. 

For Kent, language is a system that is built on shape and form, and increasingly, through acquired knowledge, as a sign or a symbol. Since 2013, her expansive paintings on black gessoed ground function as the origin site of language, cosmologies where meaning is yet to be defined. These carefully composed paintings constellate Kent’s visual language. Built up through gradients of gray, purple shadow forms simultaneously emerging and receding from the black ground, Kent sets into motion a limitless catalyst of spatial poetics through geometric fields of bright color, subtle, gestural letters and signs. The Sentimental Hand is constructed through translations of Kent’s visual language across media. In paintings on paper, Kent excerpts vignettes from her paintings on canvas, allowing the forms to flow intuitively. Where the paintings on canvas act as abstract novels, the works on paper are short stories, a format of decisive gestures, existing outside of expected narrative arc and structure. Diptych and triptych wooden frames hold Belgian linen paintings framed between walnut wood panels with inlaid dyed cast cement. One-act plays, Kent utilizes the natural weaves of the Belgian linen material as the space to explore the representation of mutil-dimentional space on a single plane–inspired by her ongoing research into architecture. Shape traced back to gestural marks originally emergent across black paintings and works on paper are built up of brightly colored forms to create abstracted architectural spaces, and then echoed as physical recessed spaces in the walnut. By using her poetic titles as stage directions, the viewer is invited in, mood is evoked, and possible actions alluded to. 

Throughout the exhibition, the galleries themselves become animated as figure / ground relationships that theatrically extend the site of her compositions, and re-enact the natural material relationships that originate in Kent’s studio. “…I can work on the wall on something large and then I can move immediately and look over to the table… when I’m making works on paper, I have them out in the room together, because they start to speak to one another. What happens on a larger canvas ends up happening on a work on paper. They all end up getting influenced.” Drawings from Kent’s paintings are extracted as punctuations, cut wooden shapes indicate scene changes, or, cast in cement inanimate beings, actors in the vignette dramas. Returning to these abstract shapes, each originating as hand-cut paper pieces by the artist’s hand, Kent practices how her language moves out in the room, and around the room. This space of dynamic, physical play, holds a unique power– to create metaphor for how a language becomes embedded in and subtly shapes the parameters of our environment…real or imagined.