Seth Pimentel –
AN ODE TO CATHARSIS

Kalashnikovv Gallery presents ‘An Ode to Catharsis’, the first solo exhibition by Seth Pimentel. Highly regarded as an illustrator, ‘An Ode to Catharsis’ continues the artist’s steady foray into contemporary art. This began with ‘Captive Audience’, a 2020 group show, and followed with a well-received presentation at FNB Art Joburg 2020. 

As the title suggests, this body of work is premised on a quest to discharge emotion as Pimentel sought to re-evaluate his identity and find balance after a period of personal turmoil. “My ex and I had just broken up and I moved into a new place. I remember sitting in my studio completely overwhelmed, thinking of how new it all was.”

In the midst of the emotional upheaval, Pimentel picked up some paint and began to pour out his raw emotions onto blank canvas, resulting in the distorted portraits depicting a variety of emotional states he went through over the following months. 

“At that moment, what I was looking at conveyed exactly how I felt,” he says, calling the process a ‘cathartic metamorphosis’. “I called the body of work ‘Ode to Catharsis’ as a sort of thank you, because even though I still have very intense emotions I feel like I’m better at managing those feelings. My partner had become a steady structure in my life – a focal point. Without that, I was swaying left and right and spiralling out of control.”

While the depiction of emotion could have easily taken any expressive form, Pimentel’s own fascination with the human face would dictate direction as it previously has in his illustration work. However, unlike that client-commissioned, design-intensive work, this body offered Pimentel the space to create without much regard for convention. No reference images were used and structure – editing on Photoshop, sketching on a grid as he normally would – was eschewed in favour of a free-hand approach, experimenting with palette knives, broken paintbrushes, different kinds of paper and colour.   

“You can see by palette which day I did what piece and how I felt on each of those days. There’s a whole body of pinks and blue. On those days I was listening to Miles Davis ‘Blue in Green’ on repeat.  I was listening to Dizzy Gillespie at some point and all that emotion from the music and what I was feeling internally kind of put a timestamp on each piece.”

Adding spray-paint lends the work a sense of definition, tonal variation and volume, preventing what the artist says could have been “flat imagery with streaks of colour”.

With ‘An Ode to Catharsis’, Pimentel strips the band-aid off both fresh and forgotten wounds that have festered over time. This is perhaps in the hope that leaving them exposed will aid in a continuing process of purging and re-calibrating. It is an expression of emotions as unfixed as the delineation of the tumult Pimentel sought to convey in this body of work.