OFLUXO

After each workday, Lukas Karbus enters his atelier. No sketching, nor prep drawing is needed, he paints alla prima. Unnamed, referred to in terms of its dimensions, the aquarelle diligently lies on a massive table, serviced by the artist, who caters to it from multiple angles. The process repeats for about a month, with little aberration. Then the composition is completed. (As he spends so much time with all different sides on the horizontal plane, this causes a peculiar impact – he may momentarily confuse its orientation when elevating it into the vertical realm. Swiftly, he recalls its correct coordinates.)

If his previous show proposed a union of figurative landscape and abstraction, in this project, Karbus demonstrates that his reflections on ‘landscape’ are more programmatic and deliberate, the term becoming, rather than a set of shapes, a principle of internal correlation. This untitled exhibition houses Karbus’s most recent works (and one older painting bearing witness to them), in their most thawed and flowing state of existence yet. Visions of nature geometrised into a crystalline, almost art deco grid, long devoid of the grip of time, have now mostly freed themselves from the hold of figurative depiction, and occasionally from the artist’s control.

Some areas are now inundated with colour, others painstakingly layered. Ribbons of colour – gunshots of blue, pools of glowing emerald, valleys and holes of thick, bare paper, rather than possessing a weighty conceptual raison d’etre, the works provoke a trance of synesthesia. Banner-like, floating and oozing in thin air, tied to the room only by thin cords of linen, these large papers aim to just be.