Craig Kucia: The Night I Told My Story to the Sky

About

For “The Night I Told My Story to the Sky”, Craig Kucia’s second solo exhibition at the Pit, the artist presents a new body of work creating enigmatic still lifes that attempt to illustrate intangible states of memory and loss. How do you make an image out of something that’s not tangible? This question permeates Kucia’s practice and is a guiding principle that can be seen throughout his many bodies of work. Though often figurative, Kucia thinks of these compositions within the realm of abstraction - compositions in which he pulls together harmonious colors and forms that visually balance though they may be thematically incongruous. He returns to certain subjects like windows, birds, flowers: symbolic imagery laden with cultural or historic significance.

Kucia’s latest body of work centers around mortality and the symbols of rebirth. Each painting contains a moon and sun, the cycle of time, and in that cycle, objects from fragmented memories. Reflecting on the loss of his grandmother who suffered from dementia, Kucia depicts subject matter inspired by things she had said while dealing with her deteriorating memory. Kucia says he was struck by the visuals she would bring up, fascinated by those things that rose to the surface of her fragile mind. She would talk about how she missed the moon and the flowers while they were visible right outside her window. Sometimes she would confuse night with day, showing up to her hair appointment long after the salon had closed. Painting became a way of reorganizing the limitations of memory on canvas. Engaging dualities, night and day, sun and moon, Kucia evokes surreal environments where the two exist simultaneously, confronting one another on the same plane.

Kucia’s paintings, with a dynamic and graphic quality, resemble the space of dreams or imagination. Flowers in the foreground blend with the wallpaper or merge into the space of the table. The form of a snake is filled with a scene of the night sky. Clouds float across the background of each work, sometimes taking on the shape of repetitive flowers other times decorating the surface of a ceramic pot. The collapsing of space creates a surreal environment in which the viewer might project their own experience. Kucia’s background in photography is apparent in his use of framing, often returning to the window or the picture frame as a compositional element. In deploying visual tricks, conflating the picture frame with a window, Kucia’s paintings draw attention to the constructed nature of picture making itself, asking us to reflect on the ways in which we imbue the natural world with meaning. Truly a painter’s painter, Kucia employs multiple, sometimes incongruous, techniques altogether in single compositions creating a remarkable surface that encapsulates a love and mastery of the medium.