Nina Johnson is pleased to announce iluminaciones, an exhibition of small-scale oil paintings by Los Angeles–based Venezuelan artist Luz Carabaño. iluminaciones traces a preoccupation with lightness, specifically the weight and light perceived by the eye. Using hues at once pale and bright and employing soft transitions, movement, glares, and slippages, these works occupy a liminal space. The images exist somewhere between an internal and external world—subtle and quiet, yet reverberating with an energetic thrum.

Carabaño was born in Venezuela; her father often painted, and she was raised among art-filled homes before moving to the United States fostering an early and enduring relationship to art. While small-scale oil paintings like those on view in iluminaciones predominate her practice, she also creates ceramic objects, drawings, and handmade books. Each of her paintings and drawings departs from a visual reference, but as she paints, she lets go of the reference, allowing the image to come together intuitively. Language and conceptual ideas about the work don’t exist in the making, only once she steps away from the finished works does she begin to see the threads that bind the pieces together and find the appropriate words. Those linguistic threads come through in the paintings’ titles, which hint at both the ideas of the earthly and the ephemeral, occupying a world of their own: viento (wind), trazos (sketches), halos, órbita (orbit), deslizamiento (glide), malla (mesh), llave (key).

For each work in iluminaciones Carabaño stretches linen over shaped panels, the forms of which are based on freehand contour drawings. She then cuts the supports out of wood and finishes the canvas with gesso. The shapes of these canvases resist the predictable orderliness of the traditional right-angled pictorial format; Carabaño describes them as softened rectangles that have been touched on all sides. That softening results in a blurring of boundaries and a sense of openness. Much of the imagery in these paintings recalls traces of the natural world—in malla darkened shapes stretch diagonally across the plane evoking shadows, while the smudged marks in viento recall the movement of sand pulled by the sea. The simple abstract compositions of deslizamiento and en cuatro explore borders or divisions through the repetition of form with an almost hypnotic quality. Perhaps even more powerful than composition and color is the tactility Carabaño achieves in these works. At first the softened forms seem to create a contemplative space, inviting the viewer in, but to fully engage with these works is to also realize their intensity—portals to and from this world, alive and electric. Luz Carabaño: iluminaciones is on view in the Front Gallery through November 23rd, 2024.

Luz Carabaño (b. 1995, Maracay, Venezuela) is a Los Angeles–based Venezuelan artist. She received a BFA in studio art from New York University in 2017 and an MFA in painting and drawing from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2022. Carabaño works primarily in small-scale oil paintings on shaped supports, ceramic objects, drawings on paper, and handmade books. Recent solo exhibitions include antesis, Super super markt (Berlin, 2024); encuentros, Hannah Hoffman (Los Angeles, 2023); sombras, Lulu (Mexico City, 2023); rastros, Larder (Los Angeles, 2022); Unfoldings, april april (New York, 2022); and Ni aquí, ni allá, Dimensions Variable (Miami, 2019). Carabaño was the 2021 recipient of the University of California, Los Angeles’s Helen Frankenthaler Award in Painting.