randian | 燃点

Artist Talk Saturday 25 November, 11am

“In this new body of work I have begun to incorporate new painted surfaces that resemble textiles, carpets, geological forms as well as the crater-like surface of the moon. These new elements together with the illusionistic gesture, a painterly device I have worked with for some time, read as being both image and abstraction. In my studio I have samples of carpets as well as photocopies of rocks and empty architectural space. I enjoy trying to mimic the textural and material properties of these objects and the painterly problem solving that comes with it. Similarly to how I have adapted and refined brushes and tools to generate a variety of gestural marks, these new textural surfaces have required a new set of invented tools that I have developed in the studio.” – Gregory Hodge, 2017

Opening S+S Singapore / Saturday 25 November, 5 – 7pm

When I first encountered Karen’s paintings (by accident, on a too long family holiday in stifling heat just north of the Tropic of Capricorn) I was reminded how convincing paint can be; her surfaces demand close, sustained inspection. Shadows are clues for eyes, negative space shifts into limbs, glazed pools of colour collect as faces (faces so particular—like bubble gum just before it pops.) Her work plays with its own contradictions; figuration and abstraction become useful alternates for history and myth, which collude on the painted surface as they do in life. If contemporary abstraction forms an image of how the world feels, then Black is all abstract. Time, both contemporary and historical, is shaken and stirred and settles momentarily here; developed, gently printed, but unfixed.

The familiarity I feel in the presence of Karen’s work is arcane but certain. Recent works like Bed mess, Floating dream, Body shell, and Table manners recall duty, illness, the strange proximity of motherhood and childhood and, particularly, the betrayal of our own bodies. In the spectral shadows and shifting parameters of Karen’s work, I see a skilled yet automatic hand that might claim to outsource creativity to a higher power. I think of the Spiritualists, of the bright and ecstatic palette of Hilma Af Klint. I think of the maudlin faces of the symbolist painter Odilon Redon. Each one of Karen’s paintings seems part of a larger whole. Like Klint and Redon, her work is concerned with the science of last things—with death, judgement, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind—and is contained by the unhurried contemplation of everyday objects and people. Like Morandi, but on acid.