Carlos Caballero

Galerie Greta Meert is pleased to present its first exhibition with Cuban
artist Carlos Caballero (b.1983, Camagüey, Cuba. Lives and works in Ghent,
Belgium).
The pictorial space deployed in Caballero’s paintings is at once vast and
self-contained, it unfolds within the confines of the canvas. Oscillating
between quasi formalist grid systems, seemingly expressionistic symbols,
and geometric shapes, his approach to painting is slow and reflective,
but also punctuated by more painterly moments that come to disrupt the
original tempo. His use of schematic forms meticulously brushed onto
the canvas lend his work the graphic quality of some indecipherable
instruction manual. By exerting this process of perpetual doing and
undoing, composition and decomposition, his paintings tend to escape
traditional categorisations to expose their own internal logic.
While it could appear to bear some of the seriousness of modernist
abstraction, Caballero’s work displays a more playful aspect. At times,
the spatial arrangements and configurations taking place on a flat and
monochromatic plane can resemble the slow-moving shapes of early
electronic games or computer graphics. The various elements that
construct each one of his paintings can in turn be seen as set of arcane
tools, blank objects and abstruse diagrams, waiting to be excavated one
layer at a time, time after time.