Kate Trafeli: Desire Lines

Like the spider weaves their silken web, Kate Trafeli’s methodology is rooted in instinct and concentrated isolation. The resultant paintings, in all their jewell-toned visual zestfulness and playful relationships between buoyant and weighted form, ensnare the onlooker, tempting them to find their own associations, to organically tread their own ‘desire lines’ through each work.

Born from Trafeli’s personal perspective, her paintings represent experience, memory and place, for the most part abstracted and in cases featuring markings which allude to maps, landscapes, doors, windows and bridges. That elements pertaining to traversing divides are suggested in Trafeli’s work seem entirely fitting given her habitation of the U.S., Italy, and London, and in the liminal nature of the themes in which the artist finds inspiration; a fleeting memory, a transition between emotions. These private themes reveal their universality when visitors, prompted by Trafeli’s work, approach the artist with recollections and stories of their own.