Kaden Van De Loo is a painter and recent graduate of the UW Milwaukee, where he received a bachelor of fine arts in painting and drawing and a minor in art history. His artwork is currently exhibited at the Annex Gallery in the Arts and Communications building, which opened on Sept. 12.

Van De Loo’s work has been exhibited in the Portrait Society Gallery in Milwaukee, the Trout Museum of Art in Appleton, the Aylward Gallery at UW Oshkosh at Fox Cities and Greenpoint Open Studios in Brooklyn, New York. He is a current member of the 2024-25 Bridge Work program in Milwaukee through the Plum Blossom Initiative.

When Van De Loo was very young, he said he drew constantly, and he would go through different phases of art creation, switching from visual art to music.

“Growing up with musicians as parents undoubtedly shaped the ways I now

approach art,” he said. “My dad specializes in jazz and improvisation, so from his practicing to the wide array of music he listened to, I was always hearing a lot of experimental musical forms that I developed an appreciation for. I often think about these equivalents between painting and music: surface and materiality, tone and timbre, touch and feel, monochromes and drones, for example.”

In high school, Van De Loo started to get back into visual art, first with drawing and photography

and then with painting in 2018.

“That summer, I just experimented with paint and different tools, and something clicked,” he said. “I have always been a creative person and have dabbled in various creative forms, from visual arts to musical ones to creative writing and poetry, but none of them truly clicked or stuck. For whatever reason, painting was different, and by late high school, I knew it was what I wanted to do.”

The Annex Gallery is Van De Loo’s first solo show, and he said earning this opportunity just a few months after graduation is something he is extremely grateful for. 

“It’s one thing to be in the studio filling the walls with paintings, to be in the zone and just working. It’s another to see that energy through to a conclusion,” he said. “What makes a solo show so great is that I get to be the curator of my own work, playing with arrangements and combinations.”

Van De Loo’s paintings operate within a system of rules: each painting has a single ground color, the forms within the paintings are simple geometric shapes, all of these forms are contained within the edges of the surface, and the forms do not overlap or touch.

“Each rule exists to enhance relationships. The consistency of the ground evens the field that the forms occupy, the geometric forms are simple, and the isolation and containment of each form — as well as the isolation and containment of each painting — keeps everything distinguishable,” he said. “Having very strict parameters allows me to build a language of moves and sensibilities, and then to play and improvise.”

“In my arrangement of the paintings overall, I wanted to create conversations across pieces

that surpass aesthetic likeness in the way a certain form talks to another form in the painting

next to it or across the room, for instance,” Van De Loo said.

Artwork from Van De Loo’s “Installation Images of Oasis” can be seen in the Annex Gallery until Oct 3.