Light from my Pencil

Light from my Pencil is MC Lilly Catalino's first show with Mazzoli Gallery in Berlin. For the past 10 years she has worked on a specific body of paintings and drawings representing the result of her life-long research.

The exhibition explores the artistic landscape; both the inner life of emotions and the external study of trees. MC Lilly Catalino’s most recent paintings display individual cells, squares, blocks of vibrant color that are meditations on the transformation of energy. MC, as most people simply call her, is a colorist and purist. She mixes her paint by hand from pigments and powdered minerals. No two colors are the same. With close attention, each color square reveals itself to be its own painting, a cell and part of the whole.
Her grids are first drawn in pencil with lines that are not shy of human imperfection. Indeed, everywhere and under everything, MC's pencil is ever present. She often refers to her work as ‘Light from my pencil’. This could be a difficult concept to grasp as a pencil appears to draw only black; and yet, we can see how this artist's lines search, seek and find the light.
The measurements respect Bauhaus asymmetry. There is non-linear storytelling, emotional coloring, and abstract expression within systematic blocks. In these paintings there are footnotes to Chuck Close’s portraits, Agnes Martin's grids, Ellsworth Kelly's Squares to Annie Albers' quilts. There are also traces of her early years in New York, computer graphics, pixelated videos, and the lure of Rubik’s cube that all come out to play.
Her exploration of nature within the confines of the canvas began in 1981 with an abstract painting entitled The Way that Trees Grow . In a recent interview, the artist said, “I have been working in this way from the very beginning.”
At the time the artist was living in New York City (1981-1993) alongside artists, musicians, photographers and filmmakers. She painted, made computer drawings, and words became yet another language for art making. Words have always been important for the artist's identity, as she has lived between America and Italy since she was 6 years old, and often switches between languages and uses both Italian and English words in the same breath.
In the early years she did not want to show her work. “I was not a trained painter. I did not go to art school. Many people acted as fari , as lighthouses, for me, giving me courage to continue.” Emilio Mazzoli [founder of Mazzoli Gallery] was one of those Fari; a veritable lighthouse who encouraged her to move towards the light. The two have known each other since 2003 and years of conversations about art became a catalyst for this exhibition.
Shortly after, MC spent long periods of time in Kent, while her daughter attended the same boarding school that she had as a teenager. This enabled her to focus on her work as she had not been able to for years. She returned to mixing pigment like she had done back in New York in the 1980s. This time she could afford all the colors she wanted - the cadmium yellow, oranges and reds. The cerulean blues, the verdant greens. As her palate expanded, in purity and in intensity, the colors began to sing. The trees kept growing.
The way that trees grow, however, is slow. To MC, the paintings are trees - Tall Trees - that took their time to grow and years to paint. "There is a sense of solitude even when you are a tree but there is also an ecosystem hidden below the earth, the roots communicate and radiate information."
Laying stylistic and historical references aside, a curious eye observes paintings that are deeply rooted in the artist's sensibility for nature, the life of trees, the changing light, the shifting seasons, and the sound of color as it whistles through the leaves.
“Light from my pencil,” is a window frame to observe how the artist’s work has evolved over the years: the words, the language references, and the paintings themselves as they move from intimate sketches to bold canvases, from blurry snapshots and visceral brush strokes to carefully devised geometric compositions.

Text by Lara T Gilmore