"Underneath every glamorous surface there is almost always a tense or tragic situation. Kate Waters' images contain what I would like to call suspicious stillness."

Andrés Isaac Santana, Madrid. July 2021

"Underneath every glamorous surface there is almost always a tense or tragic situation. Kate Waters' images contain what I would like to call suspicious stillness."

Andrés Isaac Santana, Madrid. July 2021

"Underneath every glamorous surface there is almost always a tense or tragic situation. Kate Waters' images contain what I would like to call suspicious stillness."

Andrés Isaac Santana, Madrid. July 2021

"Underneath every glamorous surface there is almost always a tense or tragic situation. Kate Waters' images contain what I would like to call suspicious stillness."

Andrés Isaac Santana, Madrid. July 2021

"Underneath every glamorous surface there is almost always a tense or tragic situation. Kate Waters' images contain what I would like to call suspicious stillness."

Andrés Isaac Santana, Madrid. July 2021

"Underneath every glamorous surface there is almost always a tense or tragic situation. Kate Waters' images contain what I would like to call suspicious stillness."

Andrés Isaac Santana, Madrid. July 2021

This is an oeuvre concerned with perception: with how the individuals portrayed here perceive themselves and their surroundings and how viewers, from their own voyeuristic standpoint, perceive the same. In the works of Kate Waters, too, one often has the feeling of catching players unawares, of their postures or glances revealing more than they realize.

Perhaps the most common player in these urban dramas is the „passerby“. What helps to dispel the sense of isolation and loneliness suggested by many of these works are their rich coloration and a luminescence that sometimes has the vividness of stained-glass windows. One is tempted at times to think of these works not so much in terms of the painterly tradition of photo-realism and more as a kind of photo-surrealism. What Neo Rauch accomplishes through distorted proportions and historical incongruities is realized here through a subtle poetry of the commonplace.

Throughout the work of Kate Waters, one can observe a careful interplay of form and content. Nor should we be misled by the impression that the compositions take life from the „throwaway“ medium of the snapshot. First of all, it is the spontaneous as opposed to the posed scene that fascinates the artist. Furthermore, her subjects are usually in motion and unaware that they are being photographed. In this way, Waters wrests an authentic, typically unprepossessing yet redolent moment from the flow of time. 

At periodic and increasingly brief intervals, art criticism takes note of the renaissance of figurative painting. In point of fact, it never went away. Even while he was creating his all-over action paintings, Jackson Pollock regularly returned to the figurative/symbolic mode of his earliest works. Nor has a flood of digital imagery seemed to stem the hunger for the painted representation of „the real thing“. The ability to mimic while simul- taneously transforming reality constitutes a kind of laying on of hands. With increasing virtuosity, Kate Waters takes part in this ritual act.