Julie Karabenick’s Little Lessons
By Annie Poon
Julie Karabenick, Composition 52, 2004, ©Julie Karabenick
To Lancaster Amish quilt makers, patterned materials and figurative imagery was too suggestive of the outside world. They shunned busy fabrics and focused instead on solid colored squares. With restraint came focus and mastery. The Amish succeeded in creating awesome geometric abstractions many consider surpassing modernism in authority and intensity.
"Perhaps you can not help thinking, ‘How modern’. But that is an illusion: the truth is that Amish quilts embody the reductionsim, the search for fundamentals, that modernism wanted to find in more "primitive" cultures, but they are no more modern than a Fang mask is cubist. In fact, they come from a culture to which modernism is anathema" (Robert Hughes, The Art of the Quilt).
Like Amish quilts, the geometric abstract paintings of Julie Karabenick glitter and hum with restrained intensity. She shuns figurative association in favor of a quieter experience. Julie stands in front of the large acrylic paintings of cubes and freely associates, naming abstract forces like compatibility, attraction, loneliness and isolation as key concepts in her work.
Urban viewers quickly associate Karabenick’s trademark cubes paintings with digital technology and color theory. To many, her impulse to work with squares and play with the grid takes cues from digital technology. Spectators also attempt to decipher her work by drawing lines of decadency from Albers, Hoffman, and other modern painters.
Perhaps to the trained eye all abstract art looks modern. Karabenick admits fascination with primitive abstractions of the American Indians. But in order to penetrate the logic behind these particular works, Julie hints at a more personal approach. Karabenick’s paintings are not intended to be cross-sections of some indecipherable digital map any more than they are formal studies of color. For her, the works are allegorical.
She encourages spectators to seek out the narrative element: To meditate on the relationships and behavior of the cubes. The key to decoding each painting is in knowing that each cube is a free agent with an agenda. Little squares, sensitive to their environment, move unpredictably depending on their personalities. Their behavior has less to do with color and more to do with arbitrary traits assigned by the artist.
In ‘Composition 46’, small brightly colored cubes buzz around a few brightly colored planes. They stack in rows and seem to vie for a place closest to the central figures. Three large ice-blue blocks around the perimeter benign or menacing attitudes. Most of the little cubes act in agreement and gravitate towards center. But a few stragglers appear to leap for the cooler opportunity of these massive icy plains. Perhaps they will lure the others to mutiny? A block emerging at lower left looks determined to squeeze the central clusters apart with its dangerous corner. At the top of the painting, another block drifts safely below seemingly uninvolved in the scene. The third block attracts little cubes with an almost magnetic force.
If the cubes are surrogates for living organisms, then each painting is an active culture. Continued meditation yields rich rewards and little lessons on life emerge.
