Our visual world has become increasingly dominated by pixilated images.
Julie Karabenick: Expansion and Ascension Beyond Geometry
By Zhanna Veyts
Our visual world has become increasingly dominated by pixilated images. Critical discourse is dominated by declarative rants about the end of painting and the turn to new media work as the new beacon of postmodern artistic expression. In this climate, it can seem hard to believe that artists haven’t followed the trend and put down their brushes. Julie Karabenick’s "Composition" series reveals that despite the purist idealism of the Modernist painter’s project, its formalist vocabulary still has something to teach us about our own states of being and our technologically transformed social environments.
Karabenick’s work is an investigation of the very fundamentals of painting: color and form. She begins each painting with a set of rapid, uncensored sketches, composing and dividing space, opening the planar boundaries between figure and ground to make room for a new dynamism of color. She then employs the computer to conduct a set of color studies and refine her compositional choices, to manipulate the interplay of hues and values. Bringing the work back to the human hand, however, she applies opaque acrylics onto the canvas in strong, angular forms resulting in flat, frontal compositions. The asymmetric variations on the single shape of the rectangle upon a uniform surface facilitate a reading of relations and oppositions, an exercise which preoccupies Karabenick. In this way, she uses new media to reinvent standardized practices of Geometric Abstraction. Integrating the procedural with the structural, the colors move the eye around the canvas much like action painting. She keeps her compositions large and open, moving toward Mondrian’s formidable sense of dynamic equilibrium.
Karabenick addresses art historical precedent, including Geometric Abstraction, as peripheral to her work. "I think it’s meaningful to engage with what went on in the past," she addresses, but adds that Geometric Abstraction is more a stylistic orientation than a definitive genre. "You see geometric forms being used in work which references the world (abstractions from landscape or geological strata, architecture or city maps) and works which purport to reference the intangible (the sublime, the unconscious, the transcendental). If you pose geometric abstraction as one broad category within abstraction – the second being a sort of expressionist orientation (the linear versus the gestural, the rational versus the lyrical or poetic, the precise versus the gestured – and these dichotomies are often superficial or false), then you’ve got one big hunk of artistic terrain – Geometric Abstraction -with its inhabitants wanting to distance themselves from one another or take the first train out of there."
Clearly devoted to an understanding and observation of geometry as seemingly ever-present in any narrative of art history, Karabenick points out that the shape holds a sacred value with the viewer. From African patterns to cave paintings, from Islam’s undulating calligraphy to Buddhism’s symmetrical mandalas, formal relations have been used by artists in various times and diverse cultures to access resonant emotional and acute psychological responses in the viewer. Vivek Narayanan has observed, in a previous review of Karabenicks early works, that her engagement with formalist methods is incredibly emotive: "A tremendous amount of precise intuition has been crammed into these little squares- they generate minute imbalances that set the painting into a sense of the incremental, provisional motion, rather than have it project a priori perfection." As a set of choices that emerge out of a process of calculation, her engagement with Geometric Abstraction seems to function as a dialect of visual language. "Investigating in geometry overtakes me. Through doing it every day, I relate to the shapes," she insists.
As the meditative value of the work becomes more central to its affect on the viewer, the dialectic between the figurative and the abstract surfaces for debate. Rather than objects or places, the paintings figure states, tensions, rhythms. They contend visual discussions of balance and imbalance, lightness and gravity. As in Composition 48, the elements serve as spatial metaphors for such experiential senses as expansion and ascension. The viewer’s experience is one of resonance with the work rather than a calculated recognition of a referent. In its phenomenology, the piece returns a sense of individualism to the viewing experience that had seemed obliterated by the pixilated imagery of commercial media that congests our visual vocabularies. Each work strives to orchestrate its own internal conversation and to excavate a new set of relations of visual elements in an effort to evoke a visceral reaction in its recipient. Though one might argue that every artist has these aims, Karabenick’s layered and disciplined procedure seems to be the key to the surprising interplay between deliberation and spontaneity. This tension produces a potent, guttural affect on the viewer, who walks away unknowingly transformed by her formalist exploration.
