The exhibition presents a body of work by Alexandra Karakashian, centred on a long-term engagement with a single material: oil. More precisely, engine oil – black oil, greasy oil, and slippery oil. Across installation, textile, and works on paper, her practice unfolds as an inquiry in which oil becomes her primary medium and feeds geopolitical questions. Oil is a material inhabited by deep time, it is an ecosystem originating from prehistoric marine life, transformed by human intervention into a substance that fuels contemporary life while bearing the trace of environmental violence. It is a matter that exceeds us, in its scale, and imperial symbolism.
By working with one of the most powerful resources on earth, Karakashian’s practice exposes the contradictions embedded in oil’s omnipresence. While it structures everyday consumption, it also underlies systems of extraction, environmental injustice, and power. This material engagement resonates with broader histories of displacement and loss that inform Karakashian’s ongoing research. Drawing from her family history with an Armenian heritage, her work reflects on what it means to be un-homed, historically and geographically. The artist’s relationship to this material is tense, shaped by its malleability in spite of allowing so little control. Oil holds a life on its own, moving across surfaces and operating on temporalities that resist immediate visibility.
Her process is grounded in an attentive resonance to the material’s behaviour. She is loyal to its texture, she allows oil to dictate rhythm and pace. The slow movement of oil demands that she pauses and these moments of stillness require observation. The oil becomes alive beyond her and she acts with it. Each encounter is a corps à corps with the material – it is absorbent, resistant, and often blended with pigments and oil paint. What emerges is often a dense black surface shaped by movement, where her gestures recall dance – she becomes one with the material across paper, textile and installation.
Organs of breath (2025), is a large-scale installation composed of long strips of textile dipped in pools of engine oil. The work is a shifting choreography transforming gradually over time. As the oil seeps and rises, it occupies a new terrain, building height and monumental presence in dialogue with the high-ceiling space. The installation invites sustained viewing, positioning the audience as witnesses to an ongoing process. Its theatricality suggests the resurfacing of an erased ecosystem bringing visibility and breath to what has been rendered invisible. The rising black surface is the voice of dead marine life coming back to life. These natural species, once living organisms, are never absent, they remain present as organic memory within oil, as they animate its movement on the surface of textile.
These ghostly organisms' reappearance speaks to the continuum of the violation of the environment. Bodies and land are deeply interconnected, ecosystems return, here, in visible languages that demand an end to neo-colonial systems of mass destruction. Her practice resonates with Jane Bennett’s notion of vibrant matter1, which suggests that materiality is affective, capable of resisting, influencing and actively resonating with human intention. For Karakashian, oil is ancient sunlight and heat – sunlight is what transforms that living organism that dies in the bottom of the ocean. It is in this liquid mass and final point that they come alive again, until they become matter resonating in the hand of the artist.
Moving between monumentality and silence, softness and movements, Karakashian’s practice holds space for violence and sensitivity. By committing to a single, contested material, that is alive, unstable and largely unknown in its physicality, she invites the audience back into sensory engagement and critical awareness about its symbolism. It is a form of resistance that counteracts and complicates our relationships to power. It offers a way to sit with it through attention, through not knowing and through the act of holding onto something as we gaze into it.
1 Bennett, J, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Duke University Press Durham and London, 2010.
La exposición presenta un conjunto de obras de Alexandra Karakashian, centrado en una investigación a largo plazo en torno a un único material: el petróleo. Más precisamente, aceite de motor — aceite negro, graso y resbaladizo. A través de la instalación, el textil y las obras sobre papel, su práctica se despliega como una indagación en la que el petróleo se convierte en su medio principal y alimenta preguntas geopolíticas. El petróleo es un material habitado por el tiempo profundo; es un ecosistema originado en la vida marina prehistórica, transformado por la intervención humana en una sustancia que impulsa la vida contemporánea mientras conserva la huella de la violencia ambiental. Es una materia que nos excede, tanto por su escala como por su simbolismo imperial.
Al trabajar con uno de los recursos más poderosos del planeta, la práctica de Karakashian expone las contradicciones incrustadas en la omnipresencia del petróleo. Aunque estructura el consumo cotidiano, también sustenta sistemas de extracción, injusticia ambiental y poder. Este compromiso material resuena con historias más amplias de desplazamiento y pérdida que atraviesan la investigación continua de Karakashian. A partir de su historia familiar y su herencia armenia, su obra reflexiona sobre lo que significa no tener hogar, en un sentido histórico y geográfico. La relación de la artista con este material es tensa, moldeada por su maleabilidad y, al mismo tiempo, por el escaso control que permite. El petróleo tiene una vida propia: se desplaza sobre las superficies y opera en temporalidades que resisten la visibilidad inmediata.
Organs of breath (2025) es una instalación de gran escala compuesta por largas tiras de textil sumergidas en estanques de aceite de motor. La obra es una coreografía cambiante que se transforma gradualmente con el tiempo. A medida que el aceite se filtra y asciende, ocupa un nuevo territorio, ganando altura y presencia monumental en diálogo con el espacio de techos altos. La instalación invita a una contemplación sostenida, situando al público como testigo de un proceso en curso. Su teatralidad sugiere el resurgimiento de un ecosistema borrado, devolviendo visibilidad y aliento a aquello que ha sido vuelto invisible. La superficie negra ascendente es la voz de la vida marina muerta que regresa a la vida.
Moviéndose entre la monumentalidad y el silencio, la suavidad y el movimiento, la práctica de Karakashian sostiene un espacio para la violencia y la sensibilidad. Al comprometerse con un único material, disputado, vivo, inestable y en gran medida desconocido en su fisicidad, invita al público a regresar a una experiencia sensorial y a una conciencia crítica sobre su simbolismo. Es una forma de resistencia que contrarresta y complejiza nuestras relaciones con el poder. Ofrece una manera de permanecer con ello a través de la atención, del no saber y del acto de sostener algo mientras lo contemplamos.
« Elle a dit d’une voix neutre : ‘C’est fini’ » (La Place, Annie Ernaux, 1983)1
Mourning is a perpetual state. The grim march of the contemporary world is rhythmed by a succession of tragedies, the collective accumulation of loss, and the recurrent erosion of respect, making exit impossible. The wake, in this context, can no longer be seen as a conclusion—amoment of reckoning with death, a ritual to bear witness and enact closure. Rather, the wake is a continuum. Just as the deceased and the living linger in that liminal vigil, the residue of death is incessantly present, forever clinging to the living. By situating us ‘after’ the wake, Alexandra Karakashian confronts the viewer with this residue, drawing us into the uneasy co-existence of death and life.
The wake is mute. But it is not silent. Nor is it still. In Karakashian’s works, everything is alive, even if they emerge from death. Soaked and tattered cloths—the remnants of the artist’s process of applying engine oil and salt to surfaces—envelop paintings like shrouds. Through slits and folds, a fragment of an image appears, while the rest is swaddled, out of sight, in the stained fabric. The works Wake I and Wake IV (all works 2024) hold a host of tensions, not just between the seen/unseen, but within the very act of draping in fabric, which teeters between shrouding a ‘dead’ painting, or swaddling the work as one would a newborn.
While the artist candidly refers to the hidden paintings as ‘dead,’ they are nonetheless sites of restless activity—the ongoing chemical reactions of her material ensure they are teeming with unexpected life. Sump—‘exhausted’ engine oil at the end of its life cycle—mixes with salt (ironically a substance that both heals and excoriates) in a volatile chemical dance that churns clandestinely behind the cloth. Similarly, in Laid to Rest, paintings are folded and stacked, seemingly poised for ‘burial,’ crowned by a rock which oddly reads as both tombstone and counter-weight (to suppress the engine-oil-induced activity beneath).
This life-ensconced-within-death dynamic threading through the works in After the Wake makes a critical point about potency: the dead—whether human or material—continue to act on the living. The oil in Broken sun I, Broken sun II, and Monolith slowly seeps on the reversed canvas over time, altering the halo effect as it bleeds. The cloth in towards the sun defies stasis, hanging defiantly over the frame’s edge, signaling the near see-through nature of its composition. Echoing the same monolithically vertical mark-making-strokes, the mourners, perhaps the most figurative work in the show, literally captures the life-death pivot moment of the wake itself: bodies, elsewhere evoked obliquely in works like Come adrift and Laid to rest, suddenly coalesce in a solemn vigil, the oil’s conquering bleed casting an eerie halo over the convening.
Unsurprisingly, the body underpins Karakashian’s interrogation of how works inhabit space. Come adrift is the most exuberant manifestation of the artist endowing a work with bodily presence. A larger-than-human-scale painting floats in space, tied around what might be its neck, its head masked in the turbulent folds of a dyed cloth, the ‘body’ splayed in a floor-bound swathe. The work’s stately poise is belied by a sense of imminent collapse and fall, to say nothing of the muffled violence bound up in the scene. More abstractly, Weep summons the titular bodily function in its downward cascade of oil-tinged paper sheets.
Just as Come adrift seems to relish disrupting the conventional display space, and Weep shares this delight in breaking away from the plane of the wall, works like Wake I and Wake IV confound the function of the frame. The picture frame is a dictator: it determines what a viewer is ‘allowed’ to see, cordoning off the visual field as the sole locus of attention. Karakashian thwarts the power of the frame by stifling it below cloth, which has, consequently, usurped and altered its role: the shrouds only allow fragments—strips, patches, corners—to be seen, fairly haphazardly. This ‘emasculation’ of the frame is, in fact, a deeply profound gesture, further problematizing how a work is ‘contained’ in white cube conditions. Moreover, Wake II goes so far as to entirely upend viewing convention: the enshrouded painting, itself the ‘blotter’ layer used during the process of
painting Towards the sun, is actually facing the wall, doubly distancing its reception by the viewer.
Such strategies of concealing and containing constitute one of the most satisfying tensions in Karakashian’s works, principally because she performs a double shift. First, she topples the somewhat predictable longing for a ‘reveal’ as a counterpoint to the act of concealing. Not only does the reveal never come (even though the peeking game is indulged in, slyly, in works already mentioned), it becomes unnecessary. We grasp the secret existence of the concealed work as part of a whole, like some symbiotic latent/potent binary machine generating a holistically legible artwork. The latency of the work, not the work per se, becomes the focal point. Second, she elevates a process-bound, normally cast-off tool to the status of stakeholder in the display and reception of the work. The humble cloth—with which the artist paints, dabs, swabs, and wipes—participates doubly: as part of the genesis of the work, and as the work itself. Shrouded is emblematic of this strategy: the cloth-as-concealer-as-work. The accessory forecloses any revealing of the concealed work it has shepherded to life, asserting its claim both as participant in the process and as determining agent of the whole work’s interpretation. This tantalizing balance of latent/potent is yet another wry articulation of the death/life overlap.
It is over. Or is it? The potency of the dead hides in the recesses of these draped cloths, in the sullied and stained surfaces of invisible paintings, in the still-bleeding halos of sump. Death may have ignited this show, but the subtle gravitas of Karakashian’s works makes us understand how they can be alive, yet on entirely different terms.
1 “She said in a blank voice, ‘It’s over.’” (A Man’s Place, Annie Ernaux, translation Tanya Leslie,
1992)
« Elle a dit d’une voix neutre : ‘C’est fini’ » (La Place, Annie Ernaux, 1983) 1
El duelo es un estado perpetuo. La sombría marcha del mundo contemporáneo está marcada por una sucesión de tragedias, la acumulación colectiva de pérdidas y la erosión recurrente del respeto, lo que hace que la salida sea imposible. La vigilia, en este contexto, ya no puede verse como una conclusión: un momento de confrontación con la muerte, un ritual para ser testigos y llevar a cabo un cierre. Más bien, la vigilia es un continuo. Así como los fallecidos y los vivos coexisten en esa vigilia liminal, el residuo de la muerte está constantemente presente, aferrándose para siempre a los vivos. Al situarnos ‘después’ de la vigilia, Alexandra Karakashian confronta al espectador con este residuo, llevándonos a la incómoda coexistencia de la muerte y la vida.
La vigilia es muda. Pero no está en silencio. Ni está quieta. En las obras de Karakashian, todo está vivo, incluso si emergen de la muerte. Telas empapadas y desgastadas—los restos del proceso de la artista al aplicar aceite de motor y sal a las superficies—envuelven las pinturas como mortajas. A través de rendijas y pliegues, aparece un fragmento de una imagen, mientras el resto está envuelto, fuera de la vista, en la tela manchada. Las obras Wake I y Wake IV (todas las obras de 2024) contienen una serie de tensiones, no solo entre lo visible/invisible, sino dentro del propio acto de cubrir con tela, que oscila entre ocultar una pintura ‘muerta’ o envolver la obra como se haría con un recién nacido.
Si bien la artista se refiere sinceramente a las pinturas ocultas como ‘muertas’, son, no obstante, sitios de actividad inquieta—las reacciones químicas continuas de su material aseguran que están rebosantes de vida inesperada. El sump—aceite de motor ‘agotado’ al final de su ciclo de vida—se mezcla con sal (irónicamente una sustancia que tanto sana como excoria) en un baile químico volátil que se agita clandestinamente detrás de la tela. De manera similar, en Laid to rest, las pinturas están dobladas y apiladas, aparentemente listas para ‘entierro’, coronadas por una roca que curiosamente funciona como lápida y contrapeso (para suprimir la actividad inducida por el aceite de motor debajo).
Esta dinámica de vida-encerrada-en-muerte que atraviesa las obras en After the Wake plantea un punto crítico sobre la potencia: los muertos—ya sean humanos o materiales—siguen actuando sobre los vivos. El aceite en Broken sun I, Broken sun II, y Monolith se filtra lentamente sobre el lienzo invertido con el tiempo, alterando el efecto de halo mientras se desangra. La tela en Towards the sun desafía la inercia, colgando desafiantemente sobre el borde del marco, señalando la casi transparencia de su composición. Resonando con la misma marca de trazado vertical monolítico, The mourners, quizás la obra más figurativa de la exposición, captura literalmente el momento del pivote vida-muerte de la vigilia misma: cuerpos, evocados de manera oblicua en obras como Come adrift y Laid to rest, de repente se fusionan en una vigilia solemne, el desbordamiento conquistador del aceite proyectando un halo inquietante sobre los reunidos. No sorprende que el cuerpo sustente la indagación de Karakashian sobre cómo las obras habitan el espacio. Come adrift es la manifestación más exuberante de la artista al dotar a una obra de presencia corporal. Una pintura de escala mayor que la humana flota en el espacio, atada a lo que podría ser su cuello, su cabeza enmascarada en los turbulentos pliegues de una tela teñida, el ‘cuerpo’ extendido en un pliegue que roza el suelo. La majestuosa postura de la obra se ve desmentida por una sensación de inminente colapso y caída, por no hablar de la violenciacontenida en la escena. De manera más abstracta, Weep evoca la función corporal titular en su cascada descendente de hojas de papel teñidas de aceite.
Así como Come adrift parece disfrutar interrumpiendo el espacio de exhibición convencional, y Weep comparte este deleite en romper con el plano de la pared, obras como Wake I y Wake IV confunden la función del marco. El marco de la imagen es un dictador: determina lo que se ‘permite’ ver al espectador, delimitando el campo visual como el único foco de atención. Karakashian frustra el poder del marco al sofocarlo bajo tela, que, en consecuencia, ha usurpado y alterado su papel: las mortajas solo permiten ver fragmentos—tiras, parches, esquinas—de manera bastante azarosa. Esta ‘emasculación’ del marco es, de hecho, un gesto profundamente significativo, problematizando aún más cómo una obra está ‘contenida’ en condiciones de cubo blanco. Además, Wake II llega incluso a invertir completamente la convención de la visualización:
la pintura enrarecida, que es en sí misma la capa ‘blotter’ utilizada durante el proceso de painting Towards the sun, está realmente de cara a la pared, distanciando aún más su recepción por parte del espectador.
Tales estrategias de ocultar y contener constituyen una de las tensiones más satisfactorias en las obras de Karakashian, principalmente porque realiza un doble desplazamiento. Primero, derriba el anhelo algo predecible de un ‘revelado’ como contrapunto al acto de ocultar. No solo nunca ocurre la revelación (aunque se accede al juego de mirar entreabierto en las obras ya mencionadas), se vuelve innecesaria. Nosotros entendemos la existencia secreta de la obraoculta como parte de un todo, como una especie de máquina binaria simbiótica latente/potente que genera una obra de arte holísticamente legible. La latencia de la obra, no la obra en sí, se convierte en el punto focal. Segundo, eleva una herramienta normalmente desechada, sujeta al proceso, al estatus de participante en la exhibición y recepción de la obra. La humilde tela—con la que la artista pinta, da toques, limpia y seca—participa de manera doble: como parte de la génesis de la obra y como la obra misma. Shrouded es emblemática de esta estrategia: la tela- como-ocultadora-como-obra. El accesorio impide cualquier revelación de la obra oculta que ha guiado a la vida, afirmando su derecho tanto como participante en el proceso como agente determinante de la interpretación del conjunto de la obra. Este cautivador equilibrio de latente/ potente es otra irónica articulación de la superposición vida/muerte.
Se acabó. ¿O no? La potencia de los muertos se oculta en los rincones de estas telas drapeadas, en las superficies manchadas y sucias de pinturas invisibles, en los halos que aún sangran del sump. La muerte puede haber dado inicio a esta exhibición, pero la sutil gravedad de las obras de Karakashian nos hace entender cómo pueden estar vivas, pero en términos completamente diferentes.
1 “Dijo con voz inexpresiva: ‘Se acabó’” (A Man’s Place, Annie Ernaux, traducción de Tanya Leslie, 1992)
Alexandra Karakashian’s paintings are made from used engine oil and black pigment on canvas. Engine oil – also known as petroleum, or crude oil – is a material with simultaneous, often contradictory associations.
Oil is so mundane that it is used to propel our vehicles, to heat buildings, and to fuel electricity almost everywhere in the world. At the same time, it is so valuable that countries spend trillions and even go to war to get it. Most of the oil on earth was formed between 60 million and 250 million years ago. And yet, it is consumed in seconds. That we have oil at all is thanks to the delicate balance between life and death that has distinguished our planet from all others in the solar system for millenia. The oil we burn now is destroying the planet and could potentially end the dance once and for all.
Karakashian’s paintings mimic these dualities. Presence and absence. Dark and light. They are simultaneously pulling inwards and seeping out. They are abstract and yet imbued with politics. They are immediate – the dark marks appear as little blasts of now – and yet they feel deeplyhistorical, like ancient pools unearthed. The oil, diluting as it spreads across the canvas, conveys two senses: one of timelessness (the oil seeping bit by bit forever) and one of entropy (the oil starting to run out).
Karakashian’s smaller works on paper are made by applying layers and layers of oil paint and then wiping them off. Some of them have salt sprinkled on top. Salt is a material that is similarly contradictory in meaning. Evidence of this can be found throughout the English language. Salt is associated with value: the word salary comes from salt, to be worth one’s salt is to be worthy of acclaim. Salt also has negative connotations: salting the earth was an ancient practice in times of war to prevent the defeated city from growing new crops; to rub salt on a wound is to aggravate pain.
Oil is a paradox. Salt is a paradox. These paintings are paradoxes. They are both quiet and incendiary. Articulate and illegible. Haunting and soothing. These paintings call to mind a spectrum: the permeable boundary between two poles. Poised on this axis, we reach out to grasp Karakashian’s meaning. It eludes us, returning to the realm of the unknown.
The show as a whole recalls a ghazal. Composed of a matla (opening couplet), radif (refrain), and internal qaafia (rhyme), the ghazal is a form of poetry with origins in ancient Arabic. The ghazal tradition is marked by its simultaneity of meaning (desire’s pleasure-pain, love’s bittersweetness). It accomplishes this simultaneity through a series of lines that repeat themselves. These linesreach for meaning (in the Beloved, in God) but never find it. For the poet Sarah Ghazal Ali, the ghazal “intimates order, then shows its hand, revealing clamor, chaos, commotion.” The power of the ghazal lies not in its meaning, but in the act of reaching.
We might think of each of Karakashian’s paintings as a line. Each line is repeated but not elucidated. Consolation. Consolation. Consolation. Unearthed. Unearthed. Unearthed. Together, they form a series of rhymes and refrains. Their effect is melancholy: they reach for consolation and reveal chaos; they unearth only to find more earth. Meaning does not cohere. Instead, we are suspended in the paradox. The act of reaching is dual. We reach towards the paintings, and the paintings reach towards us. Between two acts of reaching, we touch – but cannot grasp – the unknown.
Las pinturas de Alexandra Karakashian están hechas de aceite de motor usado y pigmento negro sobre lienzo. El aceite de motor, también conocido como petróleo o crudo, es un material con asociaciones simultáneas, a menudo contradictorias.
El petróleo es tan mundano que se usa para propulsar nuestros vehículos, para calentar edificios y para alimentar la electricidad en casi todo el mundo. Al mismo tiempo, es tan valioso que los países gastan billones e incluso van a la guerra para conseguirlo. La mayor parte del petróleo de la Tierra se formó hace entre 60 y 250 millones de años. Y, sin embargo, se consume en segundos. Que tengamos petróleo es gracias al delicado equilibrio entre la vida y la muerte que ha distinguido a nuestro planeta de todos los demás en el sistema solar durante milenios. El petróleo que quemamos ahora está destruyendo el planeta y podría acabar con el baile de una vez por todas.
Las pinturas de Karakashian imitan estas dualidades. Presencia y ausencia. Oscuro y claro. Están simultáneamente tirando hacia adentro y filtrándose hacia afuera. Son abstractos y, sin embargo, están imbuidos de política. Son inmediatos: las marcas oscuras aparecen como pequeñas explosiones del ahora y, sin embargo, se sienten profundamente históricas, como estanques antiguos descubiertos. El aceite, diluyéndose a medida que se esparce por el lienzo, transmite dos sentidos: uno de atemporalidad (el petróleo filtrándose poco a poco para siempre) y otro de entropía (el petróleo empezando a agotarse).
Las obras más pequeñas en papel de Karakashian se realizan aplicando capas y capas de pintura al óleo y luego limpiándolas. Algunos de ellos tienen sal espolvoreada por encima. La sal es un material que tiene un significado igualmente contradictorio. La evidencia de esto se puede encontrar en todo el idioma inglés. La sal se asocia con el valor: la palabra salario viene de sal, valer la sal es ser digno de aclamación. La sal también tiene connotaciones negativas: salar la tierra era una práctica antigua en tiemposde guerra para evitar que la ciudad vencida produjera nuevas cosechas; frotar sal en una herida es agravar el dolor.
El petróleo es una paradoja. La sal es una paradoja. Estas pinturas son paradojas. Ambos son silenciosos e incendiarios. Articulado e ilegible. Inquietante y relajante. Estas pinturas recuerdan un espectro: el límite permeable entre dos polos. Posicionados en este eje, nos acercamos para captar el significado de Karakashian. Nos elude, volviendo al reino de lo desconocido.
La muestra en su conjunto recuerda un ghazal. Compuesto por un matla (disco de apertura), un radif (estribillo) y un qaafia interno (rima), el ghazal es una forma de poesía con orígenes en el árabe antiguo. La tradición ghazal está marcada por su simultaneidad de significado (placer-dolor del deseo, agridulce del amor). Logra esta simultaneidad a través de una serie de líneas que se repiten. Estas líneas buscan un significado (en el Amado, en Dios) pero nunca lo encuentran. Para la poeta Sarah Ghazal Ali, el ghazal “intima orden, luego muestra su mano, revelando clamor, caos, conmoción”. El poder del ghazal no radica en su significado, sino en el acto de alcanzarlo.
Podríamos pensar en cada una de las pinturas de Karakashian como una línea. Cada línea se repite pero no se elucida. Los títulos de las obras dan una pista. Consuelo. Consuelo. Consuelo. Desenterrado. Desenterrado. Desenterrado. Juntos, forman una serie de rimas y estribillos. Su efecto es melancólico: buscan consuelo y revelan el caos; desentierran solo para encontrar más tierra. El significado no es coherente. En cambio, estamos suspendidos en la paradoja. El acto de alcanzar es dual. Nos acercamos a las pinturas y las pinturas se acercan a nosotros. Entre dos actos de alcance, tocamos, pero no podemos captar, lo desconocido.
“To be unhomed is not to be homeless, nor can the ‘unhomely’ be easily accommodated in that familiar division of social life into private and public spheres”
In The Location of Culture, Homi K. Bhabha
The work of Alexandra Karakashian, from up close and from afar, conveys a series of refined sensations that are both powerful and subtle. The initial perception is that the media and technique come together in pictorial works exhibiting great aesthetic purification, emerging from a reworked view of American abstract expressionism. However, the materials used by the artist (used engine oil and salt) have a meaning that goes beyond the simple contradiction between poor materials and noble materials so common in the history of painting. Their value is symbolic and deeply rooted in the current problems between North and South, such as environmental degradation, commoditisation and the essential elements for life. Both materials have been a source of conflict throughout history.
Solnitsata, the first prehistoric town in Europe, was built around the production of salt in the region. Salt, one of the essential elements required for life, was used as a currency and was also a symbol of wealth. This town, located in what is now Bulgaria, 50 kilometres from the coast of the Black Sea, is considered the oldest example of a European city.
Rather than having a conceptual perception, we are compelled to interiorise the works due to the feelings of disturbing tranquillity that they awaken. The opportunity to focus so closely on the vastness of these abstract landscapes and on their chromatic simplicity makes it so the feelings end up predominating over the conceptual justification of the works.
Painting is a tool that has the ability to nurture an intuitive relationship between the viewer and the work. This ability is especially evident here. Karakashian’s works are a journey exploring concepts like reminiscence, exile and exodus.
The artist unloads the symptoms of a sense of preoccupation about something that has not yet been experienced. Her family’s history arises as an essential note in her biography, explaining the extent to which the personal is political. Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of unhomed allows us to understand this concept as the sense of compulsive displacement from historic roots.[1]
The desire to examine intersections between ecology, transcendence, commoditisation and exile come from her personal history. In 1915, her grandfather, still a baby at the time, had to flee with his family from the Armenian Genocide and migrate. The family initially relocated in Romania and later headed south, first living in Egypt, before finally settling in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Painting has historically played a preponderant role in transmitting narratives of the self in the West. What happens when this narrative is not Western? It is at the meeting point between different epistemologies that we can think of renewed ways of looking at common concepts and give them new meanings that are not necessarily the negation of previous symbols, but rather end up creating a hybrid narrative that coexists in the area of contact between cultures.
Since 2009, Alexandra Karakashian’s work has been based on an almost scenic technique that involves displaying her used engine oil and salt paintings vertically on isolated canvases or emerging from vats of oil. The overwhelming beauty of her paintings results from how the oil randomly spreads over the canvas. An atmosphere of anticipation and solemnity is created by the use of black on a white background. The black and white blend together, defying gravity through capillary action, and the salt struggles in the face of the quickly advancing oil. The smell of oil permeates her works and fills the surrounding space.
There is something fundamental in Karakashian’s paintings, like a refined gesture that emerges from the artist’s body language. With a past connected to dance, this body language emerges naturally and eventually transcends the idea of figuration that her paintings negate; the dimensions of the paint strokes are, for the most part, in keeping with the dimensions of her body. And like the materials that the artist uses, her personal history is full of wealth and rebuff. Her work creates metaphors for intimate feelings of constriction, but also for the anticipation of becoming collectively unhomed (eco: oikos).
Bruno Leitão 2019
[1]Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture 1994