Donnabelle Casis’s new work turns what was pink and fleshy in her previous work into a graphic language of whipping, taut lines. The white ground on which she paints alternately recedes and encroaches on the paint, complicating the stability of foreground and background space. In this pared-down series of paintings on canvas and paper, Casis is asking how much information is needed for the viewer to create an association between the colorful marks and a referent. Casis casts a broad net for inspiration; while Disney’s cartoon imagery is most immediately recognizable, there are also references to William Morris, Qin Dynasty costumes, product design, celebrity fashion, and icky orifices that squirt, drip, and ooze.

Cartoons depend on the element of danger to punctuate moments of giddy hysteria. Disney’s characters are forever being “zonked,” “powed,” and “bonked,” and there is always a rake or a nail to be stepped on by the hapless villain. Cartoon imagery punctuates Donnabelle Casis’s paintings—here a “poof” image, there a “pow” explosion, and over there a double set of parenthesis that are used to indicate wobbling after a jolt. The compositions are arrived at through a sort of chance operation in which Casis layers Disney cartoon coloring book pages and studies the intersections of different highly recognizable images.

Casis’s paintings traverse moments of danger, comedy, recognition, and dissolution elliptically; the cycle of visual reading rotates through abstract and figurative readings, allowing the viewer to project into the active white space between marks. The viewer, for once, need not feel ignorant for seeing a pig or a bunny (or something more human) in an abstract painting.