Luz Carabaño at Lulu

Artist: Luz Carabaño

Exhibition title: sombras

Venue: Lulu, Mexico City, Mexico

Date: February 7 – March 25, 2023

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Lulu, Mexico City

Lulu is pleased to present a solo of the Los Angeles-based, Venezuelan artist Luz Carabaño.

Luz Carabaño makes small paintings on shaped canvases of a distinctly exquisite, finely crafted na-ture. Based on drawings, each support is personally handcrafted by the artist to take on a unique form. Canvas is then meticulously and all but seamlessly stretched over the support, which is then built up and sanded down to assume a smooth uniform surface. The imagery on the surfaces of the canvas-es is often as hard to define as the shapes of the canvases themselves. Categorically indeterminate, Carabaño’s images seem to be at once in the process of emerging and withdrawing. They behave if not like fleeting traces of memory, then like objects perceived on the threshold of consciousness, or as if perpetually in the process of becoming. To make matters even more ambiguous, it is difficult to say where on the picture plane the images are taking place. Carabaño often manages to create a sense of flat, illusionistic space in which whatever she’s depicting assumes an almost hologram-like sem-blance. While the paintings themselves are physically modest in size, it would be a mistake to refer to them as a ‘small scale,’ as the transformative impact they have on the negative space around them is striking. At once concise and outsized, Carabaño’s precisely nebulous paintings can be seen as elegant arguments, at the very least, for painting’s expansive capacity for what the English, romantic poet John Keats famously coined as “negative capability” which is to say, when one “is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Luz Carabaño (b. 1995, Maracay, Venezuela) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her BFA Studio Art, New York University (2017) and recently completed her MFA in Painting and Drawing, University of California, Los Angeles (2022). Solo exhibitions include, (2022) rastros, Larder, Los Angeles, CA; Unfoldings, april april, Brooklyn, NY; an echo, a shadow, a shape, New Wight Gallery, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA; (2019) Ni Aquí, Ni Allá, Dimensions Variable, Miami, FL. Group exhibi-tions include (2022) Cove(r), in lieu, Los Angeles, CA; of this world (two-person with Sydney Acos-ta), CASTLE, Los Angeles, CA; A Minor Constellation, Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Those Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer, Make Room, Los Angeles, CA; Glower, Larder, Los Angeles, CA; Reimagined Landscapes, Calderón, New York, NY; Mid Trip, Winton’s, Los Angeles, CA; Fragments (two-person with Annette Hur), Shin Gallery, New York, NY; (2021)Vignette, False Cast at BRUCE, Los Angeles, CA; El papel aguanta todo, Capitulo 5 (refugio), Diablo Rosso, Panama City, Panama.

[1] Keats, John (1899). The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats, Cambridge Edition. Houghton, Mifflin and Company. p. 277.