Jonathan Casella at Gross! Gallery

Jonathan Casella, Driving as fast as I can up the Arroyo Secco Parkway (2024). Acrylic on canvas, 53.5 × 45.5 × 1.5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Gross! Gallery.

The eight acrylic on canvas artworks in Jonathan Casella’s The Shapes were intended to be a playful and experimental project.¹ At Gross! Gallery, a 240-square foot project space tangential to Los Angeles’ commercial gallery circuit, Casella presented a risk-taking body of work that departs from what he is known for.² Even more provocatively, the exhibition was Casella’s way of refusing to cater to the commercial art world, which (at the moment) undoubtedly values easily digestible figurative and illustrative paintings, and return to creating artwork for the sake of it, much like his hard-edge predecessors did. These works are arguably challenging to categorize as either sculpture or painting, becoming more so zygotes of painting and object, akin to Donald Judd’s early red reliefs of the 1960s and ’90s. The Shapes displayed Casella’s reverence for the hard-edge movement that emerged in the 1950s, yet deviated from its conventions. His playful titles challenge the idea that, in the artist’s words, there is “no motive or story behind the work,” and the presence of Casella’s hand and deliberate imperfections move away from hard-edge’s illusion of perfection.

As the exhibition’s title suggests, the mid-sized artworks are an amalgamation of shapes, including circles, rectangles, hexagons, and triangles, amongst others—each work disavowing a traditional canvas in favor of a collection of combined forms. Casella made the shapes by cutting wood into a desired form before wrapping each piece with canvas and combining the panels with mounting hardware to create various configurations. Using acrylic paints and tape for clean, precise lines, Casella painted a series of motifs, defined as his “vernacular,”³ such as a band of consecutive circles, stripes, crosshatching lines, or panels of paint that mimic television static. These patterns can also be found in previous bodies of work, such as Doublestar (2021–present) and in the exhibition This Palace (2024). Yet here, Casella transforms the actual canvases into shapes rather than depicting them 2-dimensionally with paint, as in Doublestar. He also attempted to rid himself of narrative, departing from the use of the collage-like images that are screen-printed and painted onto the canvases in This Palace.

While Casella leaned into hard-edge abstraction in The Shapes, his referential titles appear to convolute hard-edge’s insistence on form over meaning (or, as Frank Stella famously said: “What you see is what you see”).⁴ Titles like Royal Gulp, Beacon, and Gentle in Sun (all works 2024) narrate Casella’s pieces, complicating his insistence that the work is devoid of meaning. In Royal Gulp, a royal blue circle rests on a landscape composed of a square of black-and-white static and a rectangle of brown cross-hatching. While the press release pointed to René Magritte’s pipe (La Trahison des images [ceci n’est pas une pipe], 1929),⁵ Casella’s title leaves viewers to connect the dots. Perhaps the titling can be interpreted as a layer of completion to the work, rather than a direct association—still, in many of them, visual associations can be made, however oblique, to their attendant titles. Driving as fast as I can up the Arroyo Seco Parkway is a gridded isosceles trapezoid sandwiched between two red circles and a band of white marquee-like dots, which call to mind car headlights or traffic stop signs. Here, Casella fails to banish the possibility of symbolic content, choosing to flirt with association with strictly nonobjective artworks that suggest a potential myriad of meanings. This departs from the hard-edge ethos articulated by critic Jules Langsner: The artworks are not intended to evoke in the spectator any recollections of specific shapes they may have encountered in some other connection.⁶

Casella does not imitate the work of his hard-edge predecessors, nor is he loyal to all their rules. In The Shapes, he is clearly interested in the shaped canvases of the 1960s and ’70s that served as an offshoot to minimalism and post-abstract expressionist painting (for instance, Stella’s Protractor series, 1967–70, which was inspired by the architecture and design the late artist saw throughout West Asia.) Mary Heilmann’s casual geometric vocabulary is also referenced, as is Kenneth Noland’s shaped canvases from the ’70s, Sven Lukin’s of the ’60s, and the work of Imi Knoebel. In The Shapes, Casella places himself within this lineage, using canvases as vessels for his very own geometry.

While the hard-edge abstractionists focused on sharp and clean forms, Casella opted for intentional, obvious imperfections. In Driving as fast as I can, the red circles are far from smooth, prompting one exhibition visitor to ask, “Was that done on purpose?” These imperfect circles reappear several times in Royal Gulp and Beacon, while the painted circles in Angel Number are unevenly spaced. The hard-edge abstractionists were preoccupied with the illusion of perfection, while Casella chooses instead to reveal his hand. While privileging structure, shape, and color like his predecessors, Casella challenges Langsner’s idea that hard-edge forms are autonomous shapes, sufficient unto themselves as shapes and nothing more. In this series, viewers have the option to pull from their own visual lexicon of shapes in order to create narrative, meaning, and visual connections.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 39.

Tina Barouti, PhD is an art historian and curator from Los Angeles. She lectures in SAIC’s Art History, Theory, and Criticism department.

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