Julie
Karabenick’s is a careful, unsentimental mind in the midst of
self-clarification. In each set of her explorations, one finds emotional
depth, unity, and a complex internal conversation between subtly-wrought colors
and shapes. The artist has developed a long process by which a work of hers
takes hold over several months, from pencil sketches, through long
trial-and-error revision on the computer (which, it should be said, does not
make the work easier but rather acts as an aid to the unconscious), then a
careful mixing of paint for color value then, quixotically, a return to the
canvas to apply and actualize the design. If Karabenick’s best early work was
piercing and cerebral, concerned with geometry and visual perception, it may be
that only with the completion and dissemination of her current "Compositions"
series – forty paintings and counting so far – that she will really arrive as a
significant artist with a remarkably distinctive, if currently unfashionable,
voice.
"Compositions"
begins with an attempt at a Mondrianic perfect balance in the early paintings
of the series such as Composition 1, but moves very quickly to somewhat different terrain.
At first, a distinction between very large and very small or narrow
color-shapes emerges. If Karabenick herself does not compose with figure and
ground separately in mind – one can see this by looking at pencil sketches for
the paintings – the large areas still start by projecting what feels for the
viewer like a background interrupted by conglomerations of lesser rectangles;
sometimes these conglomerations proliferate around a cross that divides the
canvas in four. Beyond the composition, a Karabenick work is an intimate
dialogue between both contrasting and nearly identical colors; her palate is
far more diverse than that of your average geometric minimalist, but the
overall effect of her choices, contrasts and juxtapositions is somehow always
restrained, never flashy.
The real
heroes of the "Compositions" series, however, are the tiniest: the pesky pixel
squares that seem to multiply like little cells in unpredictable ways across
the surface of the canvas. 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 incremental, provisional motion, rather than have it
project a priori
perfection. To speak of Mondrian could even be misleading here, because
Karabenick slowly tries, over the course of the series, to push as far as she
can toward delicate imperfection balanced out in equally delicate ways; and, as the works
grow more risky, and teasing, gently inverting all thought of figure and
ground, large or small, contrast and similitude, what emerges is not completion
or apotheosis, but process: deliberate, increasingly playful, exhaustive. By
Composition 40, pictured here, Karabenick has come out of the tricky woods for
a moment, and the painting offers breath, a redemptive lightness. Looking back
through the earlier Compositions from this vantage, one is struck by how remarkably
varied Karabenick’s investigations have been, given the discipline and formal
restrictions she has taken on. It is a mark of her seriousness and legitimate
ambition that she has stuck to her guns, and won. |
