Between Utopias and the Abyss

Austin Fields and Pàulla Scàvazzini

Opening Reception: April 23, 6 - 8 pm

April 23 - May 30

KALINER is pleased to present a two-person exhibition “Between Utopias and the Abyss” featuring works by Austin Fields and Pàulla Scàvazzini. Scàvazzini’s paintings articulate layered fields of abstraction, extending as site specific paintings, unfolding as unstable atmospheres where surface and depth remain in flux. Fields’ blown glass wall-mounted sculptures function as dimensional counterparts, formed through heat and gravity, their surfaces refracting light in shifting states of clarity and dissolution. The two artists create a space where ideals dissolve and reconfigure.

Austin Fields and Pàulla Scàvazzini create a world where fire and water elements co-exist in the gallery space. Fields’ work speaks to fluidity, sensuality and naturally occurring curves of the body. Her blown glass technique involves an approach that engages the material by lightly touching, sculpting, and manipulating the work during the hot process. Each piece created with fire, captures a specific moment and, and once cool, offers its own feedback to the surrounding environment. Fields explores concepts of light complexity and reflection. Multiple sculpting techniques, gravity, and mirroring practices result in a distorted visual outcome. In her Reflective Series each glass piece is unique, varies in the undulating characteristics, natural to the hand blown craftsmanship process. They are a liquid flow of light, fluid dynamics of the ocean. The mirrored round organic-shaped sculptures hold cold and strong presence, placed next to Scàvazzini’s “Abyssal Depth” painting highlighting unfixed territories within the space.

Scàvazzini’s paintings are setting a dramatic tone shifting the energy between mystical fire and fluidity of the water. The artist extends the paintings beyond the canvas to the gallery walls and floors. Scàvazzini’s creative process is physical and demanding. She moves her body through the space while covering the surfaces with layers of paint. Her site-specific paintings create an environment that emerges is as mental, as it is material: it reveals the unease born from fear, imbalance, and instability. Moving from “Abyssal Depth” to “The Contours of the Shimmering Mist”, from fire to water, the artist creates multiple worlds within the space. The center of the exhibition is anchored with Scàvazzini’s large scale diptych “Tongue of Fire” where the gesture endures, the handmade, and the ancestral art offers a form of resistance. Her work channels the strength of the historically marginalized feminine through fluid marks, radiant color, and forms that insist on presence. Organic elements dissolve into gestures and color fields, where landscape meets rupture, and destruction meets renewal.

“Between Utopias and the Abyss” exhibition holds both drama and promise. Utopias in plural offer multiple future possibilities, states in formation, worlds in constant becoming. The territories remain suspended, also point to the creation of more hospitable worlds within our own, imagined spaces of renewal. The title leaves room for mystery and fluidity, for physical, spatial, and psychological expanses that stretch beyond their own limits.

The exhibition is an affirmation of strength - two women artists who, through working with their hands and bodies, reclaim an essential and transformative power. The continuity of their processes reaffirms a vital connection to the human gesture, to matter itself, and to creation as a force of survival.

The exhibition was reviewed in The New York Times by Seph Rodney. https://kalinergallery.com/the-new-york-times

The show is on view until May 30.