NinaJohnson

Nina Johnson is pleased to announce iluminaciones, an exhibition of small-scale oil paintings by Los Angeles–based Venezuelan artist Luz Carabaño. iluminaciones traces a preoccupation with lightness, specifically the weight and light perceived by the eye. Using hues at once pale and bright and employing soft transitions, movement, glares, and slippages, these works occupy a liminal space. The images exist somewhere between an internal and external world—subtle and quiet, yet reverberating with an energetic thrum.

Each of her paintings and drawings departs from a visual reference, but as she paints, she lets go of the reference, allowing the image to come together intuitively. Language and conceptual ideas about the work don’t exist in the making, only once she steps away from the finished works does she begin to see the threads that bind the pieces together and find the appropriate words. Those linguistic threads come through in the paintings’ titles, which hint at both the ideas of the earthly and the ephemeral, occupying a world of their own: viento (wind), trazos (sketches), halos, órbita (orbit), deslizamiento (glide), malla (mesh), llave (key).

Much of the imagery in these paintings recalls traces of the natural world—in malla darkened shapes stretch diagonally across the plane evoking shadows, while the smudged marks in viento recall the movement of sand pulled by the sea. The simple abstract compositions of deslizamiento and en cuatro explore borders or divisions through the repetition of form with an almost hypnotic quality.