EXHIBITION

AN ALCHEMY OF MATTER

In My Cat Gets into Everything, a beam of light descends from above, finding a copper vessel, a dark vase, and a framed photograph of a cat on a cluttered surface below. Red drapery closes off the edges of the composition; shadows fill the rest. The room feels compressed, enclosed, lit from a source the viewer cannot locate. The cat itself is nowhere in the room: present only in the photograph, it watches from within a frame, already a representation within a representation.

The theatrical lighting in this large oil on canvas belongs to a lineage Kitterle knows intimately: the tenebrist tradition in which a directed artificial light source governs what the eye finds and what it must supply from inference. The arrangement of objects on the table, shot through with that dramatic beam, recalls the Northern European still life tradition's understanding that ordinary objects can carry extraordinary symbolic weight. Here the cat intensifies this: it is the titular character, the alleged protagonist, and yet it appears only as a photograph. The painting's humor is also its strangeness.

Edward Hopper's enclosed interiors work on closely related principles: rooms lit from a specific, unnaturally intense source, ordinary furnishings acquiring psychological weight through their arrangement and illumination, the sense that the space is observed rather than inhabited. Kitterle's room shares that quality of charged enclosure, though where Hopper's absences are human, Kitterle's is feline. The cat as specular presence, watching from within a frame, extends a recurring logic in his figurative work: the object or figure that is simultaneously present and displaced, familiar and uncanny.