Ethereal and mystical, Theodora Allen’s enigmatic paintings occupy a space untethered from any specific time or place. In her latest exhibition at Kasmin’s Tenth Avenue space, the Los Angeles–based artist presents a series of vertical canvases conceived as portals—fractured monuments and stone facades split open to reveal luminous blue skies. From these ruptures emerge delicate silhouettes of germinating flora, evoking rebirth through ruin and the quiet persistence of life beyond collapse. Anchoring the room is a large horizontal landscape: an icy terrain, cracked and splintering, that evokes the environmental trauma of a wounded earth visibly scarred by human interference. Yet even this rupture becomes a threshold, opening onto other worlds and dimensions, suspended between a shadowed underworld and a luminous upper realm where a glowing arc of light cuts through an ethereal blue sky.
These potent metaphoric images, suspended in a universal elsewhere, gesture toward the end of a civilization—the fleeting afterlife of earthly kingdoms giving way to an eternal, unearthly dimension. That said, Allen resists direct interpretation; her paintings remain deliberately open-ended, leaving room for the viewer’s imagination and culture to shape meaning. She acknowledges that visions of apocalypse informed her process, but the work reaches beyond specific reference, aiming to remain secular and mysterious. “I think that now, when we look at these types of images of this destruction, we can apply what’s going on,” Allen tells Observer, “but the image also aims to be more universal.” Through a symbolic visual language and a sustained engagement with metaphor, Allen accesses a register that transcends historical time and geographic place, resonating with broader existential concerns.
Maintaining this mysterious register allows both artist and viewer to fully engage in the mystery of creation. “There’s something transportative in painting that an 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.”
It is in the liminal space between illusion and imagination that each image becomes most compelling for Allen. Here, mystery deepens and the painting’s evocative power begins to unfold, allowing her to engage directly with the universal enigma of creation. “Sometimes it’s about the illusion, and other times it’s about the flattening of the illusion or the revealing of it,” she says. “These images only exist in this painted space that is separate from reality, but they function according to a kind of logic we recognize from the real world.” By straddling the boundary between the believable and the imagined, she preserves the kind of visual ambiguity that keeps the image alive—an object meant for contemplation, not resolution.
While critics have described the intricate construction of Allen’s symbolic imagery as an act of “mystical precision,” she resists any overtly spiritual or religious interpretation of her work. And yet her approach remains deeply disciplined to the point of being devotional—a meditative investigation of reality’s structure unfolding between physical perception, imaginative projection and the collective unconscious. Painting, for Allen, is an ascetic practice: the slow filtering and layering is a way of stepping back from the image, the material, and the self all at once. “I think there’s an aspect of searching in the process,” she reflects. “It’s a combination of something that’s very controlled, but also, again, endlessly mutable.” In that mutability, the alchemical nature of painting reveals itself, where matter transforms and meaning begins to shimmer just out of reach.
Allen’s forms are repeated and refined, with a deliberate emphasis on structure, symmetry and atmosphere. The resulting images are dense with symbols and saturated with sensation, inviting a contemplative approach and offering access to archetypal dimensions embedded in the collective unconscious. “I think that’s where art can relate to the human condition, when there’s like this universal quality—when art can speak to both the personal and the universal,” she remarks, arriving at the quiet heart of her work.
“Theodora Allen: Oak” is on view at Kasmin Gallery through July 27, 2025.
