A portrait of a city and its doppelganger; a vast terrain of forged people, their heads flourishing – quite literally – with the bustle of daily life. Haircuts composed of bicycles and livestock, dump-trucks and schoolhouses, pedestrians and merchants, sprout-like cornucopias of ambition and imagination bound together, sustaining the skyline of a great metropolis. It’s a celebration of community, recalling hippy murals and album covers, tripping on the vibe of grass roots righteousness and psychedelic utopia. Kallat constructs this vision with a home boy’s pride, the minutiae of detail sharing his own clannish camaraderie. Each and every figure a real person, faithfully rendered from photos taken outside a train station, their transient existence validated and monumentalised – the nameless heroes of a cyclical (re)evolution. Kallat’s social realism encapsulates the very spirit of locality, its history and aspirations with unnerving accuracy; for this is a painting of a city out of place.
The thing with folklore is it exists out of synch; not in time, but many. It offers a sense of magic, a generational collapse, where copy after copy, retold and diluted, distils from ‘once upon a time’ an enduring and resolute truth. There’s no coincidence that Kallat approaches painting as erasure. His colours bleed and dapple, assert ghostly form, play tricks of light. Concocted from watery elixirs, applied and scrapped off, misted with corrosive liquids, each layer melting seamlessly into the next in biological and alchemical continuity. Their physicality isn’t in their substance, but rather the complete lack of it – a conception of place as indelible stain, palimpsests of uncountable intimate gestures. His canvases are less surfaces than screens: image receptors and transmitters, broadcasting fact and fiction in indistinguishable correlation.
