Primitive Dwelling

Edmond Casarella

Edmond Casarella joined the U.S. Army in 1944 and fought in Europe during World War II. After his discharge he studied at the Brooklyn Museum School from 1949 to 1951, studying printmaking with Gabor Peterdi. Casarella made his first paper relief print about 1948 and continued to experiment with the medium throughout his career.

In Edmond Casarella’s “Primitive Dwelling” a group of three figures - a mother, father, and child, perhaps - and a small animal are seen going about their daily lives within the confines of an interior, in what constitutes an unusual subject matter for the often entirely non-representational Abstract Expressionist artist: a scene of ordinary domesticity. Casarella’s normally large-scale color relief prints often focus on the sheet as an opportunity to break away from fine detail and express himself inbroad shapes and saturated colors.

“Primitive Dwelling” departs from this in its delicacy and focus on figures, but the root of Casarella’s style remains: his untethered energy. The nearly kinetic structures of the figures, the use of bold primary colors, the vibrational nature of the shapes whose edges just begin to overlap: these elements make it seem as though the scene will begin to move, each shape engaging with the other with clockwork finesse until they’ve marched off the sheet.