Caroline Kent translates 1950s cinema into operatic abstraction at Casey Kaplan

Caroline Kent presents A Light Left on in the Hallway, a new body of paintings that shifts in scale from the intimacy of a sheet of stationery to a building’s relief that towers overhead. Bridging past and present gestures—much like a hallway joins one room to another—Kent frames growth as a process of repetition and return. The exhibition’s title serves as a quiet summons, evoking the hour late at night or just before dawn: a dim corridor where shadows lengthen, dissolve, and gather again. Within this transitional architecture of light, painting becomes both witness and companion. Kent’s compositions are informed by American black-and-white cinema of the 1950s and ‘60s. When paused, a film frame resolves into a carefully composed field of tonal relationships, where gradients of gray distribute themselves evenly across the picture plane. Intimate domestic details—a lamp on an end table, patterned curtains, a dress, a hat resting on a mantel—occup