Alexandra Karakashian: Beneath the Broken Sun

Alexandra Karakashian: Beneath the Broken Sun
13th September, 2024 – 14th Novemeber, 2024
Southern Guild
Los Angeles
747 N Western Ave
Melrose Hill

Beneath the Broken Sun by South African artist Alexandra Karakashian features immense, monochromatic abstract paintings made with engine oil, black pigment, charcoal, salt, and oil paint. As Karakashian’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, the show employs non-conventional materials and process-led creation to meditate on concepts of loss, exile, and both individual and collective grief.

While painting serves as the primary medium for this meditation, Karakashian’s works transcend traditional boundaries. Her canvases are dynamic explorations, vibrating with an aliveness that challenges traditional perceptions of the medium. These vast, dichotomous pieces explore how paintings can interact and move within space. By relinquishing representational form and narrative justification, each work evokes a deeply interior experience, shifting between vivid and subtle, tranquil and vexing sensations.

Some of Karakashian’s gestures appear as scars—swathes of dense black or monolithic columns of light-absorbent depth. In contrast, other works are the inverse: blackened paint and oil nearly obscure the canvas, with minimal streaks of untouched canvas appearing as luminous blasts of light. Karakashian’s use of black is potent, embodying a rich range of meanings: resistance, death, fear, mourning, solace, restraint, and the enigmatic magic of darkness. The engine oil seeps into the fine warp and weft of the canvas, creating soft auras around each gesture. This entropic movement cannot be contained; its expansion continues long after the artist’s physical engagement with the work has ceased.

The aesthetic purity of Karakashian’s practice has been compared to the scale and density of Colour Field paintings from Abstract Expressionism. However, a perhaps more fitting comparison can be drawn with the meditative style of Dansaekhwa, or Korean monochrome painting. Dansaekhwa emphasized the physicality of the artist’s engagement with the surface of the painting, intensifying the value of improvisation and experimentation, expanding the creative process from two-dimensional to three-dimensional spaces.

Karakashian’s choice of materials invites deeper inquiry. Engine oil, in particular, carries heavy connotations. Often regarded as “crude,” oil is ubiquitous in functional usage and complicit in macro-processes of extraction, which have devastating consequences for both human and natural life. This material is weighted—on the surface of her paintings and upon the world itself.

In 2015, theorist Jane Bennett proposed a new perspective on the supposed estrangement between inanimate materials and the “vital matter” of human beings. Bennett and Karakashian similarly advocate for the concept of “vibrant matter”—the idea that all things possess an energetic current and power. Through this lens, the hubris of humankind’s fantasies of consumption and conquest is exposed, as the boundary between self and object becomes less distinct. It is within this expansive space of abstraction, experimentation, and vibrant materiality that Karakashian’s practice thrives.

Resisting the urge to theorize or celebrate her work in conventional terms, Karakashian surrenders herself to the discomfort—and boundless possibility—of the unknown and indefinable. Her work dissolves binaries, rejecting the value judgments attached to opposites such as light and dark, emptiness and fullness, subject and object, life and death. Within Karakashian’s abstract fields, this disintegration carries a philosophical understanding: these binaries represent the cyclical nature of the same experience.

Alexandra Karakashian: Beneath the Broken Sun opens on the 13th of September, 2024 until the 14th of Novemeber, 2024 at Southern Guild, Los Angeles

©2024 Southern Guild