Sim Smith is pleased to announce All Those Nickel Wishes Cast As Spells, a solo exhibition by London based multidisciplinary artist and musician, Cato. This ambitious exhibition will showcase new large-scale works, charting his practice to this point whilst following his technique as it expands, propelling his painting forward into new arrangements. Pairing collage with airbrush and painting is a multimedia practice that has become synonymous with his work. In this exhibition, Cato does away with the product of collage and instead, keeps the feeling of the medium through the complex application of paint, affording him a new freedom to explore art history, belonging, and Black culture. With scenes inspired by Polaroids taken by the artist as well as found images, he plays with notions of traditional portraiture, amalgamating people and places from London and LA streets and historical images from the Harlem Renaissance and beyond.
Cato has always drawn but it was in Mexico in 2021 where he started to experiment with canvas. Up until then he had been making animations. He started working with the airbrush as a way into painting in Mexico and taught himself all he could about the application of the medium. A year later he recalls cutting up a painting commission after a collector didn’t like it – this was the start of collage in his work, referencing the language of iconic artist, author and songwriter, Romare Bearden. Bearden, like Cato, was a multidisciplinary artist with a practice akin to that of jazz and blues composers. Improvisation lives at the heart of their practice with ideas which evolve spontaneously. Images, colours and textures from multiple sources, from street Polaroids taken by the artist to mid-century American photography (found in his father’s books, he is a writer of Jamaican and Western history) focus on elements of Black culture past and present within the work.
The paintings in this exhibition show significant development and freedom to experiment, he has moved away from the direct application of collage and instead is painting surfaces that read as collage but are made of paint alone. Source imagery informs the stylistic decisions within the work, colour combinations, scenes and clothing, with environments that play like leitmotifs referencing “The Harlem Cycle”, “A Street Car Named Desire” and “Go Tell It on the Mountain” by James Baldwin to name a few references. On how he composes the scenes, Cato remarks “After I’ve found the right faces I see what they need – if they need a bar, a bar appears around them, I match the facial expressions to the scenario, when it’s coherent, then the painting’s finished.” He is a creator of fictional worlds, suspended between history and the present. In these works, Cato builds a place that he wishes to inhabit but also to share, a form of call and response through interactive dialogue fostering a sense of community, storytelling and communication but allowing for improvisation along the way.
“I make Creole paintings mixing influences of Western and African diasporic styles. I’ve been looking at Mid-Century design, 70’s cinema like John Cassavetes, Classical composition like Caravaggio and Piero Della Francesca and American photographers like Carl van Vechten who documented the stars of the Harlem Renaissance. I want to make this imaginary world for the characters I find to live in and express their real emotions. I’m in dialogue with Romare Bearden, who himself was using the language of Picasso and Matisse and recontextualising their use of African magical forms with images of black America. I think of this kind of collage as a Black Dadaism, predicting the textures of hip hop. I use this language and cast people from photos I find and take to create scenes like stills from a drama."
It is not a surprise to learn that Cato listens to music while he is painting, he is a performer and makes music himself and is surrounded by its influence. The paintings are saturated in it, with different genres from jazz to hip hop guiding energy and variety, culminating in complex harmonic landscapes across the canvas, “I have to listen to music whilst I’m painting. When I have a break, I make music. A lot of my dad’s writing is about music, I’m always interested in performers, and I do perform with a band too.” He is part of this community, a storyteller like his predecessors, reciting narratives through music and now, through painting, “...this is how people from the Black Diaspora have told stories historically, through their most accessible forms, through music”.
-Cato, February 2025
There are paintings that do not reference collage in this exhibition, a first for Cato, black and white scenes informed by old Rhythm and Blues music and some more experimental music concerned with atmosphere and mood rather than quick changes and percussion. He notes, “Different aesthetics between playlists and albums give me different aesthetics to work from. I need that back beat to be able to get stuck in.” There is a softness to these works, an openness that allows Cato to explore changes in rhythm within his practice, opening up the whole of the human figure as one rather than looped, stuck and positioned into segments.
Freedom sits at the centre of this exhibition, the ability to change and the embrace of imperfection. This is the backbeat of his practice, propelling his painting forward and essential to the energy and dynamism within the works. Cato composes, seemingly spontaneously creating these paintings but there is a depth to his practice, a drawing upon knowledge, lived experience past and present and reverence for his predecessors that pulses through this exhibition. Each piece is unique and vital and most importantly exclusive to him, he is mastering a versatile framework by which to explore the rhythmic variations of painting through a very personal lens.
