WOAW Gallery is pleased to debut Jonathan Casella’s Pink Diamond Too. This is Casella’s first solo exhibition in Asia and marks the gallery’s first exhibition with the artist. The exhibition showcases Casella's personal experiences and reflections, depicted through his ongoing "Doublestar" series, and paintings that incorporate carefully selected found images and photography of flowers from California. Featuring 11 artworks that he created this year, Pink Diamond Too will be on view from October 27 – November 23, 2023, at WOAW Gallery Central.
The exhibition showcases Casella’s exploration of the visual syntax. Featuring his ongoing “Doublestar” series, Casella actively challenges the influence of shapes, patterns, and colors in our perception of the world by creating his own visual narrative through his syntactic and vernacularly driven works. With the title of Pink Diamond Too, the bold and strikingly eye-catching pink color indubitably permeates Casella’s works. By incorporating the color pink, Casella further explores the intersections between abstract and realistic elements through photographic imagery arranged in collages reminiscent of a vibrant comic strip. Delving into depictions of beauty and desire, Casella invites viewers into his lively and captivating pink playground.
The idea of the pink diamond stems from the iconic gemstone itself. The pink diamond has long been culturally associated as a symbol of influence and an object of desire for many, famous for its color and sheer rarity. However, the color of the pink diamond has also been a popular topic in the gemological world, with no accord amongst gemologists regarding where its pinkness comes from. The instability of its pink origins, upon which the pink diamond built its iconography and influence, can therefore be easily challenged given its lack of consensus, and brings to question the validity of the associations we place upon objects and ideas.
With works just as pink and perhaps just as iconic as the gemstone itself, Casella’s canvases deconstruct our pre-existing ideas of the world by exploring the relationship between visual language and cognition. His paintings appear to be inspired by Pop Art, an art movement that sought to challenge and subvert perceptions of mass cultural imagery, which he combines with his use of photographic images. His works isolate shapes, patterns and colors in each canvas, creating a purely sensory journey for viewers to explore, before reintroducing them through the unique visual narrative of his exhibition. Like the elusiveness of pink diamonds, Casella’s paintings highlight how coded imagery can influence our perception of reality.
The paintings in Pink Diamond Too come together to form a cohesive body of work, filling the space with a harmonious entirety. However, each of Casella’s paintings in Pink Diamond Too can also be understood as a singular work, offering a glimpse into Casella’s artistic process. Small in scale, each canvas serves as a window where we can easily move in and out of Casella’s visual landscape.
Casella’s “Doublestar” series features five paintings. Led by bold patterns and vivid colors, viewers are easily enraptured by the use of polka dots, grids, starbursts, and stripes. As we gaze upon the series, we cannot help but oscillate between the sharp, piercing lines that form the shape of the double star, and the vibrant details Casella weaves between each line. Stylistically similar in appearance, Casella draws a visual connection between the paintings and places them within the context of his Doublestar series, highlighting the influence of visual syntax in our understanding of the series.
His other compositions utilize photographic images to form a collage akin to a comic strip. In works such as Mother House and The Flamingo, Casella deliberately places his images in a way that suggests there is a message or a plot that is about to unfold. By doing so, he provokes our basic human instinct to make sense of the world around us by searching for a story or a coherent narrative structure. However, Casella impedes this process with his interfering colors and patterns, interrupting our attempts to make sense of his images, and further highlighting how our understanding of the world is influenced by external factors.
Pink diamonds, although rare and elusive, are defined by its concept as a desirable symbol of wealth and status. If we remove all meanings, prices, and connotations associated with the pink diamond, we can see that it is merely a rock, its value stemming from the ideals imposed from our own minds. Casella’s works, despite the tricky artistic process that led to the construction of his works, are simply acrylic paint on canvas. But in the hands of Casella, under the influence of his visual narrative, the contents of his work can become pink diamonds too.