Ominus, Slow, Burn
Kottie Paloma
Andrea Festa presents Ominous, Slow, Burn, the first ever solo exhibition by Kottie Paloma in Italy.
The new series of paintings by Paloma are inspired by his move from Los Angeles to a small wine producing village called Alzenau in the northern Bavarian part of Germany. The title of the show is a reference to the uncertain and ever changing times we are currently living in. From Covid, to unusual weather, to ever changing rules as to how society is “allowed” to function. Using the village as the backdrop to discuss a far more reaching view point of how the artist sees the world that becomes a semi autobiographical jumping point that allows the artist to turn inward in order to deal with what he sees happening around us no matter where we live. The village itself was founded in the 1300s and has been in a slow degradation ever since, even though it’s a very upscale and wealthy village where many bankers from Frankfurt are desperate to buy houses in. The exhibition, which features the artist's series of duo colored paintings, blurs the line between abstraction and formalism. In some of the paintings we can see references to hills and mounds, degrading hills and mounds that represent infrastructure and what we find in these hills or mounds can be an excavation of society once found there. The use of just two colors brings to mind an Ominous, Slow, Burn of the unknown and subconscious mind finding itself treading through a metaphorical forest. There’s also a humorous aspect to these paintings if one has a keen eye. A funny yet poignant reference of using the village to represent a larger picture is a bit of an oxymoron and absurd. Paloma uses this absurdity to portray the figurative components in his paintings by casting the formal characters in a quasi cartoonish manner.
Inspired by abstraction, German Expressionism, music, and current events, Paloma’s paintings are composed within the confines of a binary color scheme, create compositions that move between abstraction and representation. The compositions evoke suggestions of space, objects, symbols, and pure abstraction. These forms come together in tight, puzzle-like constructions that offer multiple entry points to the viewer, who can then find coherence out of the assemblage of contradictory parts. The artist builds these works on the basis of experiments, finding forms through a process of drawing and painting on scraps of paper that he then presses, as if printing them onto the canvas. This process allows him to maintain a sense of the looseness of his hand. The work straddles the line between graphic and expressionistic art, employing sparing methods to create vividly psychological compositions that suggest landscapes of the unconscious.
Kottie Paloma (Los Angeles, 1974) lives and works in Germany. He is a painter, sculptor, and bookmaker who has presented solo exhibitions at Ruttkowski 68 in Paris; Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, Ober Gallery, Kent, CT; Das Gift, Berlin, Germany; Ada Gallery, Richmond, Virginia; and MOHS Exhibit, Copenhagen, Denmark, among others. Group exhibitions include 2019’s Terrain Biennial presented by OTT-HOPPS, Pasadena, CA; the Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA; Bavarian State Library, Munich, Germany; No Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Alma Gallery, Riga, Latvia; and the Kreuzberg Pavillon, Berlin, Germany, among others.
