HONEST BUT NOT NAIVE

Kottie Paloma strikes me as an artist who isn’t concerned with impressing anyone. Her work feels deeply personal, a dialogue between the artist, the materials, and an inner world — and yet maybe not about her life, directly, at all.

She’s more of a drawer than a painter, but drawing is the basis for all visual art, I think. There is something a little wild, and at first maybe child-like, in her figuration. The way her landscapes and environments are organized like a kid’s drawing with objects overlapping in space, inconsistent use of scale, and veering linear perspective. And yet, there is nothing child like about the images she’s making.

There’s a medieval religious energy. A sort of industrial smog and clutter. There’s some Basquiat, but not in a derivative way. I feel Käthe Kollwitz’s presence. Anselm Keifer.

I guess it’s just the pure expressive simplicity: a stout, sturdy figure. A complex, chaotic landscape. Light and dark. A sense of the unknowable world as it really is.