The Pit is pleased to present Paris-based artist Isabella Cuglievan's first solo exhibition with the gallery. Cuglievan’s kaleidoscopic abstract paintings have a machine-like precision at first glance, but the reality is quite the opposite. It takes a careful human hand, a single wide brush, and very, very thin, unforgiving layers. Her process, in a way, translates the language of textiles into a painting. Cuglievan thinks of it as akin to the tradition of quilting. Working in tiny sections, brushstrokes are “stitched” together, from a tabletop rather than an easel, and she doesn’t see her progress until the very end when the quilt is opened up—or in Cuglievan’s case, when she finally hangs the painting upright. Acrylic ink, watercolor, and gouache glide across paper (and in some pieces, flashe on canvas) in intrepid, but symmetrical technicolor movements that make the words ‘erratic’ and ‘meticulous’ feel as though they should go together. Curved strokes give way to triangular negative space, rainbow arches often stay as they are or morph into full circles, and others of them run across the canvas in rivulets. Weaving looms, vintage jello molds, and the light-up tracks of the groovy locomotive from the Soul Train graphic lovingly come to mind.