via: carlino
Notes:
Artist and muralist Kim Carlino approaches abstraction as a living system rather than a fixed image. Her process is rooted in an exploration of geometry, color, line, and pattern as tools for investigating interconnectedness, perception, and spatial movement. Carlino’s compositions often feel improvisational, where layered forms expand and contract across the picture plane, creating an active tension between order and intuition. Instead of relying on rigid geometric precision, she allows the work to evolve organically through repeated mark-making, optical shifts, and rhythmic disruptions. This approach gives her paintings a kinetic quality, where the viewer’s eye continuously navigates between flatness and illusionistic depth.
A particularly compelling aspect of Carlino’s process is her ability to merge systems-based abstraction with emotional resonance. While her visual language references modernist abstraction and artists such as Agnes Martin and Julie Mehretu, her work avoids becoming purely formalist. Instead, she introduces a sense of poetic instability through layered gestures, fluctuating scale, and shifting spatial relationships. Her paintings unfold slowly, rewarding prolonged viewing as patterns emerge, dissolve, and reform. This temporal quality suggests that the work is less about arriving at a singular image and more about documenting a state of continual transformation. The process itself becomes performative, reflecting cycles of growth, disruption, and recalibration.
Carlino’s multidisciplinary practice further strengthens her process-driven methodology. Working across painting, drawing, murals, installation, and public art, she adapts her abstract language to architectural and communal spaces, allowing the environment to become an active collaborator. Her interest in “eco-geometric abstraction” connects formal experimentation with broader ecological and philosophical concerns, suggesting relationships between human perception, natural systems, and collective experience. This flexibility prevents her work from becoming static or overly decorative; instead, each project operates as an evolving investigation into how abstraction can shape emotional and spatial awareness. Through this process, Carlino transforms geometry into something experiential and meditative, balancing analytical structure with a deeply human sense of curiosity and play.
- RJG // AI