Dissolving binaries 'Beneath the Broken Sun' with artist Alexandra Karakashian

Southern Guild, Los Angeles is hosting Beneath the Broken Sun, a solo exhibition by artist Alexandra Karakashian from September 13 - November 14, 2024, encompassing immense, monochromatic abstract paintings. Marking the South African artist’s debut solo art show in LA, Beneath the Broken Sun meditates on the concepts of loss, exile and individual and collective grief, conveyed through Karakashian's use of engine oil, black pigment, charcoal, salt and oil paint on canvas and linen, non-conventional materials and process-led making.

While painting is the major vehicle for this meditation, Karakashian's works expand beyond this. Her canvases are active explorations, coming into being with a sustained energy that feels at odds with traditional perceptions of the medium's capacity. These vast, dichotomous canvases explore the possibilities of how paintings can move and operate in space. Relinquishing representational form or narrative justification, the intensity and simplicity of each work by the artist based in Cape Town, South Africa, compels in its viewer an abundant interiorised experience, shifting between sensations both vivid and subtle, tranquil and vexing.

Some of Karakashian's gestures appear as scars, swathes of dense black, or monolithic columns of light-absorbent depth. Others are the formal inverse—blackened paint and oil mask the plane almost entirely as minimal strobes of canvas remain, appearing as luminous blasts of light.

Karakashian's black is potent. It is a colour bountifully signifying resistance, death, fear, mourning, solace, restraint and the mythic magic of what happens in the dark. The engine oil seeps into the fine warp and weft of the canvas material, forming soft auras around each gesture. This entropic movement cannot be contained, its field of expansion is left to the consequence of time long after the artist's physical engagement with the work has ended.

The aesthetic purity of her practice has been likened to the scale and density of the Colour Field paintings of Abstract Expressionism. A lesser-known, yet potentially more apt comparison can be made with the meditative style of Dansaekhwa or Korean monochrome paintings. Dansaekhwa's approach to abstraction emphasised the physicality of the contemporary artist's engagement with the painting's surface, intensifying the value of improvisation and experimentation, dilating the sphere of creative contact from two dimensions to three.

Karakashian's choice of materials for Beneath the Broken Sun prompts further examination. Engine oil is viscous in its associations. We think of oil as something 'crude,' ubiquitous in its functional usage and complicit in macro-processes of extraction that have grave consequences for human and natural life. This material is heavy–upon the painting's surfaces, as upon the world.

Writing in 2015, theorist Jane Bennett penned a new perspective on the perceived estrangement between inert, inanimate materials and the vital matter of human beings. Bennett and Karakashian similarly advocate for the notion of 'vibrant matter'–the idea that all 'things' hold an energetic current and power. Through this lens, the hubris of man's fantasies of 'consumption and conquest' is illuminated as the line drawn between self and object becomes less opaque.

It is here, in the expansive space of abstraction, experimentation and vibrant materiality, that the artist's contemporary art practice lives. Resisting the demand to theorise or panegyrist her work, Karakashian's practice surrenders itself to the discomfort–and the unbounded possibility of, the unknown and indefinable. This dissolution of binaries rejects the value judgments we attach to polarities of light and dark, emptiness and fullness, subject and object, and life and death. In the abstract art by Karakashian showcased at Beneath the Broken Sun, this disintegration holds the philosophical truth that these binaries are the circular entity of the same experience.