Tara Kasenda Indonesian, b. 1990
Indira's lazaronte, 2025
Oil on Canvas
100 x 81 cm
In direct contrast to Nakayama’s structured compositions, Kasenda’s work turns to the sky; a space that, despite its seeming vastness, is always changing, impermanent, and filled with movement. Tara Kasenda...
In direct contrast to Nakayama’s structured compositions, Kasenda’s work turns to the sky; a space that, despite its
seeming vastness, is always changing, impermanent, and filled with movement. Tara Kasenda is a Paris-based artist who
works across mediums such as installation, sculpture, and new media, with a principal focus on oil painting on canvas.
After earning her master’s degree from the Paris College of Art in 2019, she developed a practice that merges traditional
techniques with a contemporary, digital-inflected sensibility. The sky, long a subject of aesthetic contemplation, has been
approached variously as an object of divine symbolism, a site of meteorological study. Kasenda’s color palette–composed of muted blues, soft whites and ethereal pinks, evokes early Renaissance depictions of the celestial sphere, where lapis lazuli was used to signify the divine. Her paintings do not depict the sky as a static entity but rather as a lived experience,
investigating the post-representational sky paintings, a continual unfolding of the shifts that mirror the ephemeral.
The impulse to ascribe human qualities to the sky is not new. For example, in ancient Mesopotamia the sky god Anu
governed the celestial sphere, his movements dictating earthly fates. In Greek mythology, Uranus was both the sky itself
and a primordial deity, reinforcing the idea that the heavens were not separate from life but integral to its unfolding. Even
in contemporary meteorological discourse, we continue to speak of the sky as though it possesses intention–the sky
darkens, the heavens weeps, the sun smiles upon us.
To look at the sky is to engage with something that is always disappearing. The clouds we see in one moment will never
appear in precisely the same way again. The light will shift, the atmosphere will alter, and what was once clear will become obscured. The impressionists sought to capture these fleeting effects, translating the ephemeral into color and brushstroke.
Kasenda’s works, however, go beyond mere representation; they invite contemplation of the very act of seeing"
seeming vastness, is always changing, impermanent, and filled with movement. Tara Kasenda is a Paris-based artist who
works across mediums such as installation, sculpture, and new media, with a principal focus on oil painting on canvas.
After earning her master’s degree from the Paris College of Art in 2019, she developed a practice that merges traditional
techniques with a contemporary, digital-inflected sensibility. The sky, long a subject of aesthetic contemplation, has been
approached variously as an object of divine symbolism, a site of meteorological study. Kasenda’s color palette–composed of muted blues, soft whites and ethereal pinks, evokes early Renaissance depictions of the celestial sphere, where lapis lazuli was used to signify the divine. Her paintings do not depict the sky as a static entity but rather as a lived experience,
investigating the post-representational sky paintings, a continual unfolding of the shifts that mirror the ephemeral.
The impulse to ascribe human qualities to the sky is not new. For example, in ancient Mesopotamia the sky god Anu
governed the celestial sphere, his movements dictating earthly fates. In Greek mythology, Uranus was both the sky itself
and a primordial deity, reinforcing the idea that the heavens were not separate from life but integral to its unfolding. Even
in contemporary meteorological discourse, we continue to speak of the sky as though it possesses intention–the sky
darkens, the heavens weeps, the sun smiles upon us.
To look at the sky is to engage with something that is always disappearing. The clouds we see in one moment will never
appear in precisely the same way again. The light will shift, the atmosphere will alter, and what was once clear will become obscured. The impressionists sought to capture these fleeting effects, translating the ephemeral into color and brushstroke.
Kasenda’s works, however, go beyond mere representation; they invite contemplation of the very act of seeing"
