Luz Carabaño

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

Luz Carabaño makes small paintings on shaped canvases of a distinctly exquisite, finely crafted nature. 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 canvases 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 semblance. 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.” 

— Lulu