At Kasmin, Theodora Allen Tests the Symbolic Resilience of Universal Images

Maintaining this mysterious register allows both artist and viewer to fully engage in the mystery of creation. “There’s something transportative in painting that that image alone doesn’t do. There’s something that’s deeper,” Allen reflects. “There’s something that’s sort of inaccessible and ineffable, and that painting can get closer to, like a sensory thing or a kind of aura. It’s something that you can strive for.”

Drawing from her readings and the vast continuum of visual culture, Allen moves through a symbolic register in which archetypes resurface through the act of painting itself. Her process becomes a kind of surrender to collective consciousness—one that extends across time and geography, binding human experience through inherited signs and shared forms. In the series presented here, recurring motifs of gates, doors and portals introduce a dynamic tension between the tangible and the imagined, grounding the viewer in sensory reality while gesturing toward something elusive or even transcendent.

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Over time, Allen has developed a personal symbolic lexicon, reintroducing elements from earlier works alongside new imagery to explore the mutable nature of symbols—their circulation, their transformation through changing beliefs and cultural forces, and their role in shaping human expression across generations. Each painting, charged with a singular aura, seems to carry an ominous, almost oracular quality, illuminating shadowed truths from the past, resonating with the present and pointing toward speculative futures.

It’s striking how Allen’s imagery, while deeply transcendental, remains grounded in the material reality of her process. Working directly on raw linen, she engages in a labor-intensive layering of soft gradients—pale blues, silvers and dusty pastels—building each composition through accumulation, sedimentation and subtraction. “Part of it is the way the process works, since it involves this light from behind and preserving areas of light and then dimming other areas of light. I’m always removing and adding, working in this transitional place where something starts to shift, and that’s when it starts to become more interesting,” she explains. Through this constant back-and-forth between erasure and emergence, Allen uses negative space to evoke depth and luminosity, as if the light emanates from within. The canvas becomes a porous threshold between the physical and the imaginary. This unique intuition-guided painterly lexicon took shape during her years of experimentation with collage. “I started to become really interested in how the linen and the oil can create these ghost images,” she says. “I just started paying attention to the material in this way.”

Allen’s images often appear to be dissolving—fragile, fleeting and poised on the edge of disappearance. “Because of this process and my relationship with the canvas—this slow carving out of the image—I think that if you’re willing to engage with these works, the image will almost start to break apart at one point,” she reflects. By testing each image’s limits, Allen challenges its durability, letting it teeter between coherence and collapse. As French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman argues, images that survive through time can still carry the emotional and symbolic charge of their origins. They become part wound, part testimony, part eternal, but bear within them strata of time where past, present and future coexist. In Allen’s work, the image becomes a site of memory and transformation, holding this simultaneity within its surface.

In this awareness, Allen confronts the illusion of painterly space as both possibility and boundary. “They’re not trompe-l’œil,” she clarifies. “If you just look at them through the lens of image, they fall into this kind of realist category. But if you can engage with them in a more imaginative way, then they start to break open and their construction starts to reveal itself.” In this layered approach, painting operates not only as an image but also as a process or metaphor for an existential state. “They eventually speak to these different conditions of a fleeting and transient nature of existence. They are forming, morphing, evolving and disappearing. The destruction and the renewal of imagery, the destruction and the renewal of the paint—they feed into each other as equally important parts of a circle.”