Stanley Casselman: The Beauty of Not Knowing

Opening Reception: Thursday, May 7 from 6–8PM, in presence of the artist.

Nicolas Auvray Gallery is pleased to present a new body of work by Stanley Casselman that re-engages and extends the visual and conceptual concerns of his Inhaling Richter and Luminor series (2012–2016). These paintings continue the artist’s longstanding investigation into the interplay of intuition and structure, chance and intention, and the evolving relationship between perception and consciousness.

Casselman’s practice draws, in part, from Joan Miró’s use of automatism, while departing from its historical framework in meaningful ways. Where Surrealist automatism sought to bypass rational control in favor of unconscious emergence, Casselman approaches the gesture as both instinctive and self-aware. His process inhabits a charged space between impulse and discipline, allowing form to arise through a continual negotiation between freedom and order.

Each work in the exhibition is built upon a silkscreen foundation yet diverges through material experimentation. Surfaces range from oil over silkscreen to oil over chrome on silkscreen, with select works composed exclusively of chrome over silkscreen. These layered procedures generate paintings that are at once luminous, unstable, and architectonic- works that stage a sustained confrontation between structure and dissolution.

For Casselman, this formal tension functions as more than an aesthetic problem; it becomes a metaphor for both human evolution and the evolution of consciousness. His work is grounded in a belief that color, line, and form possess the capacity to alter awareness and shift perceptual experience. From this position, the paintings engage the invisible, the indeterminate, and the paradoxical- conditions that find a compelling parallel in quantum physics. Much like quantum theory, which unsettles conventional understandings of time, matter, and causality, Casselman’s work proposes a reality that is fluid, contingent, and transformed through observation.