Painter Calla Donofrio (Art BFA 13) and her joint show with sculptor Kento Saisho ran from April 10 to May 5 at Cheremoya Gallery in Los Angeles. Densely worked and historically referential, Donofrio’s paintings establish a register of singed sanctity. While drawing from a lineage that coordinates de Ribera’s ecstatic violence, Murillo’s tenebrism, Pasolini’s devotional cinema, and the bruised palettes of Rouault and early Otto Dix by way of the commitments with mysticism and martyrdom embodied in the work of Marlene Dumas and Ana Mendieta, she is equally informed by more recent inquiries into the aesthetics of transgression developed by Darja Bájagić. Where the latter delivers the force of horror and semiotic traps through the noise and disjunctures of post-Infotainment/post-internet image-saturation attuned to the violence of viewing in itself, Donofrio directs these through allusions to historical continuities, analogizing contemporary spectatorial ideologies with archaic regimes of control.


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Email: calladonofrioart@gmail.com
Instagram: @calladonofrio