Theodora Allen: Oak

Kasmin is pleased to present Oak, the Los Angeles-based artist Theodora Allen’s third exhibition with the gallery. Allen’s atmospheric oil paintings on linen depict natural phenomena and symbols chosen for their enduring presence in human history and culture, often drawing from mythology and medieval imagery. From hearts and infinity loops to rainbows and locusts, these subjects serve to underscore nature’s propensity for renewal following destruction. Branches of an oak tree, a powerful symbol of wisdom, strength and endurance, reappear. Through compositional devices, such as gates, windows, and architectural niches, Allen's illusionistic spaces create a dynamic interplay between inclusion and exclusion. Her scenes emerge as ruins burgeoning with life, offering glimpses into a realm where the natural world and the metaphysical entwine. 

Oak reintroduces elements from past paintings alongside new subject matter. In The Rising Up (I–V) (2025), the collapse of dense stone recalls sacred sites such as altars and neolithic tombs, as well as the aftermath of natural disasters—the faults of tectonic plates or geologic ruptures. Allen’s ruins, bathed in diffuse light, would appear lifeless save for the tender new growths of the oak saplings that reach out toward the viewer. The distinctive silhouettes of their leaves, translucent and glinting, are scoured into the surface of the painting to reveal the polished white ground of the canvas below the pigment. Each painting is contained by a framed border—they are the fittings from which the stones have detached, a reminder that these facades were once sealed. Amid the nascent trees, Allen invites the viewer to put the pieces back together. Fractal passages of hearts and infinity loops, two characters that follow a continuous curvature, adorn their disjointed surface as indications of a bygone wholeness. The heart, now a ubiquitous signifier of love, is a symbol born of centuries of misunderstanding and transformation, from its first depictions in the early anatomical illustration of Ancient Greek medicine to its reemergent prominence in heraldic imagery of the Middle Ages. The infinity symbol has figured into Allen’s past work as either a stand-in or allusion to the principal form of the hourglass—both inverted, symmetrical scales upon which we measure the abstract, human-imposed construct of time. That Allen chooses to portray these symbols as engravings is significant. Just as they are carved into the surface of the stone within the paintings, so too are these symbols ‘carved’ by human culture, with meaning and association cumulatively inscribed over time. Not only do we shape the symbols that comprise our world—they also shape us. 

Achieved through a meticulous process of layering and removing oil paint, Allen’s controlled application creates an effect of luminescence that captures an atmosphere of suspended time. Swaths of watercolor pooled on the canvas are allowed to naturally evaporate, punctuating the compositions like striations in rock—an unpredictable and organic force beneath each image. Gradually introducing sheer veils of oil paint to alter the color, value, and opacity of the image—a ‘dimming’ of light—the artist reinforces a sense of ethereal presence. In decentering the real while retaining the realistic, the compositions that comprise Oak drive a stake through the figure ground relationship. Shared among each work is an urgent reminder that we are enmeshed in a world that is enmeshed in us.

Allen centers non-human subjects as ciphers for consciousness and being, a position that resists the division of nature and culture. Until the Enlightenment (a period from which the artist frequently pulls) the world and everything in it was seen as living. The subsequent and systematic de-spiriting of our surroundings—the repression of the discernable hum of life—was rooted in an insistence that humans are not part of the environment but above it. This is a divide that Allen’s paintings resist. Through the collective language of symbols, the schism between our world and that of the paintings comes closer. 

In Oak, Allen’s paintings offer the experience of a bridge across time. A rainbow that spreads over a ravaged path. An insect as the bringer of death or a promise of renewal. Shattered hearts and broken time, falling onto itself. What appears infinite can falter. The fixed monumentality of stone can become mutable, an unexpected messenger. What was is not necessarily what will be. Resisting immediate legibility​, Allen reminds us that not only do we shape the symbols that comprise our world—they also shape us. In place of prescriptive or fixed assertions, Allen offers keys to subjective understanding, and symbolic thought to articulate what strict faculties of language cannot—the very realms of art and poetry.

—Stephanie Cristello

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