Cat Roissetter, Throb, 2020, Colour pencil, graphite, crayon on olive oil primed paper, 210 x 270 mm
Cat Roissetter has become most known for her individual, affecting and experimental works on paper in coloured pencil, graphite and crayon. Also working across painting and printmaking, Roissetter's viusal language mobilises influences that extend from Rubens to Henry Darger. Roissetter’s early work was characterised by experiments with material degradation: bleaching, tarnishing and weathering her paper using techniques drawn from early photographic printing, before excavating from these harried surfaces her mnemonic images.
Moving away from the ‘weathering’ techniques of her earliest work, her more recent works on paper can be more recently typified by Roissetter’s distinctive practice of sluicing her paper with cooking oil: a process that emboldens lines and develops the abstracting effects of the carbon paper. Affording accidental marks the same level of sensitivity as the deliberate, Roissetter deploys intricate lines and splashes of vibrant colour to offset her representations of fleshy, cherubic characters, developing her interest in pattern and repetition in a way that sees the particular bleed into abstract. These labour-intensive drawing methods are part of a unique visual language, where distortion of form is a symptom of the gradual degeneration of materials and an intensity of observation that verges on the neurotic.
Roissetter’s work draws on diverse range of esoteric source material and oddities, including but not limited to personal photographs, found illustrations, Victorian ephemera, pornography, wrestling and and football footage, 18th century English portraiture, Tobey jugs and nursery figurines. This ambiguously nostalgic material re-emerges in the completed works, ‘mechanically stripped from some unknown elsewhere’, as the artist Jake Chapman has put it, ‘without gaining any better purchase on their ontological ground’. In the finished works, this material toxicity cohabits with a startling delicacy to suggest both nursery-rhyme and nightmare.
Other works include dreamlike illustrations adapted from fin- de-siècle children’s literature, depicting somnambulist figures that glide through an ambiguous rural realm as well as more abstract work: colourful representations of bodily forms, stocked with uneasy eroticism and produced using home-made carbon paper as a tool of abstraction. The result is an unnerving world of nuance and suggestion that is profoundly individual, yet full of doors and windows left ajar to admit a curious eye.
Solo exhibitions include Rural Scenes, Cob Gallery, London, UK (2022); Tender Meat (OVR), Nathalie Karg, New York, USA (2021), English Filth, Cob Gallery, London, UK (2020); JW Dunne & Other Stories, Brocket Gallery, London, UK (2018); A Thousand Plateaus, Brocket Gallery, London, UK (2016). Group exhibitions include Overspill, Terrace Gallery, London (2022); Artissima Unplugged, curated by Ilaria Bonacossa, Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art Italy (GAM - Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin, Italy (2020); Artissima, Torino, Italy (2020); The Flesh of Thought, Blyth Gallery, London UK (2019); Draw Art Fair, Saatchi Gallery, London UK (2019); Through The Looking Glass, Cob Gallery, London, UK (2018); Members Show, Bloc Projects, Sheffield, UK (2018); Drawing Now, Carreau du Temple, Paris, France (2018); Cartography, House of Fairytales, Cloud Cuckoo Land, London, UK (2018).
Roissetter was shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing prize in 2013 awarded the Augustus Martyn Print Prize and the Sketch Prize, both in 2011.