Ruel Caasi’s 15th one-man show marks a period of retrospect and reflection by the artist: a personal rumination on the past and an opportunity to revisit his earlier practice in figuration and sculpture.
The show is exhibited as an entire installation, where each component is inseparable in meaning and context from the other: the vivid blue skull fashioned from a light box, found objects creating vignettes in a glass jar, and oil on canvas paintings merging serene sea scapes and abstraction. The central image of the skull is a memento mori, an illuminated reminder of one’s mortality. Yet far from being grim and jaded about the eventuality of death, Caasi’s art embraces these moments which capture the transience of beauty and the natural cycle of life—seeking to find meaning despite the certainty of impermanence and demise. The entire landscape created within the exhibition space is a reminder of mortality but also an affirmation of hope.
Caasi also reflects on the roots of his earlier practice since the mid-1990s, where he produced figurative works and sculptures before venturing into the possibilities that abstract art offered to him as an artist. Working in abstraction for many years since then, this show is Caasi’s own gesture of rumination—aesthetic, personal, political—a long look back at what has been and what can be.
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