Charlotte Houette

Charlotte Houette engages dialectics of flatness and depth to animate her abstract paintings, distorting two-dimensional imagery as she evokes swirling surfaces and altered psychic states through subtle manipulations of visual stimuli. She renders mesmerizing expanses of contorted grids and indeterminate whorls that confound conventional modes of spatial perception; by manipulating the warp and weft of wavy two-tone checkerboards or the amplitude and velocity of marbled striations, Houette construes variables of form and substance as vectors in flux. Her paintings thus evoke a kinetic dimensionality at odds with the horizontal stability of the picture plane. This apparent paradox is intensified by the presence of rectilinear cutouts at the center of each canvas, which serve as anchors that focus the viewer’s gaze and further complicate the painting’s tension between surface and structure.