Artist Estate of the artist Acquired from the above by the present owner

Photorealism at the Millennium, Louis K. Meisel and Linda Chase, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002, p. 157 (illustrated).

Laced in a crimson corset, sheer stockings, and glossy black lingerie, John Kacere’s Natasha exemplifies the artist’s signature fusion of theatricality and intimacy. With the meticulous precision that defines his photorealist practice, Kacere renders each texture with obsessive fidelity: the taut gleam of satin, the delicate tension of garter straps, and the soft, subtle gradations of flesh pressing against the constricting fabric. Each surface is bathed in a cinematic light, pulsing with a palette of rouge, noir, and blush that oscillates between temperature and tension, seduction and sculptural stillness. Though his work was initially met with suspicion and controversy—dismissed by some critics as objectifying, or aligned too closely with commercial aesthetics—Kacere found a devoted audience within the photorealist movement that emerged in the late 1960s and ’70s. While many of his contemporaries, such as Richard Estes or Ralph Goings, focused on reflective surfaces, urban landscapes, or the machinery of consumerism, Kacere remained singular in his devotion to the body. His tightly cropped subjects are rendered with the timeless stillness of classical portraiture, but through the lens of photographic immediacy. “My work praises that aspect of womanhood,” Kacere once said, describing women as “the source of all life, the source of regeneration.” His paintings recall the compositional strategies of Ingres, Titian, and Courbet—particularly L’Origine du monde—yet they are unmistakably modern in their visual language. Strategic cropping, large-scale formats, and a glossy, almost cinematic realism place his work in dialogue with mid-century fashion photography, softcore magazines, and the aesthetics of mass reproduction. But what at first appears overtly erotic reveals itself, on closer inspection, as a highly controlled exercise in formalism. The subject’s anonymity—her body bracketed just above the waist and below the knees—frustrates narrative identification and redirects attention toward surface, symmetry, and repetition. Over time, Kacere’s influence has quietly seeped into the visual language of fashion, advertising, and film. His signature framing and tactile attention to undergarments can be seen in the opening shot of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, as well as in clothing campaigns by designers such as Christopher Kane and the American streetwear brand Supreme. At a cultural moment increasingly attuned to questions of the gaze, representation, and agency, Kacere’s work invites complex readings. Rather than foreclosing the debate around erotic imagery, his paintings hold space for its contradictions: reverent and objectifying, formalist and fetishistic, timeless and unmistakably of their moment. Today, Kacere’s work can be found in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Erie Art Museum in Pennsylvania, the Portland Art Museum, and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, among others. Though less widely known than some of his photorealist peers, his singular focus and painterly rigor have earned him a cult following and a renewed relevance in contemporary visual culture. His work lingers in the imagination—resolutely formal, unabashedly sensual, and increasingly recognized as a vital thread in the fabric of postwar American painting.