Even in the darkest darkness there is light
Exhibition: Even in the darkest darkness, there is light
Text: Zita Sárvári
“A really good picture looks as if it’s happened at once. It’s an immediate image.”
― Helen Frankenthaler
“Abstract paintings are like fictitious models because they visualize a reality which we can neither see nor describe but which we nevertheless conclude exists. [But] with abstract painting, we create a better means of approaching what can neither be seen nor understood because abstract painting illustrates with the greatest clarity.”
― Gerhard Richter
Karolina Árpa’s first solo exhibition invites us to explore her rich imagination and the mastery of her graphic and painting techniques developed over the past three years. The exhibition features large- scale paper- and canvas works and one unique object, showcasing the intensified, overwhelming force of boldness, freedom, instinct, and obsession.
Having established a significant international career as a makeup artist, Karolina has been exploring and mastering the characteristics of watercolor techniques in Venice since 2018. She investigated the unique interactions between water, paints, brushes, and paper. Initially, her representational art gained a unique character, evolving into beautifully layered, veiled surfaces and organic shapes through her self-taught efforts. By gradually abstracting concrete forms, her swirling motifs became increasingly monochromatic. In the midst of informal spaces, non-referential shapes, sometimes soft, sometimes more structured, emerge, culminating in a visual illusion that balances between micro and macro, real and otherworldly dimensions.
Karolina moves comfortably across all dimensions, from the minute to the monumental. Her practice is characterized primarily by a detailed observation of nature. Her beautifully crafted forms flow, swirl, move, and occupy the space of imagination. Her paintings are simultaneously turbulent and serene, eccentric and introspective, leading us into a parallel fantastical world while highlighting the drama and beauty within the details of reality.
In her works, Karolina is fascinated by the technical processes of painting: the uncontrollability of paint and the precise, delicate forms that emerge from it, the potential within chance. Her works simultaneously reveal their creation process and disguise it. They invite both close scrutiny and the interpretation of abstraction. The unpredictable, the spontaneous, the expressive are as much a part of her creative process as their conscious shaping and well- articulated positioning. The duality present in her black and white works, the deliberate artistic decisions based on contrasts, the colors, and the familiar phenomena hinted at in the motifs (gaseous smoke, flowing water) open a pathway into the meaning-laden realms of the female principle, female magic, the subconscious, the dark, mystical sides of psychic forces, and the dimensions of the human mind.
Moreover, the abandonment of color emerged as a conscious decision in 2021 in response to the ongoing events in her homeland, Ukraine. The depiction of a world stripped of color, floating in nothingness, devoid of perspective and anchors, in 2021, heralded the foreboding of war in her paintings.
2024.05.15. – 05.31.
Curator: Zita Sárvári
K6 Galéria
1072, Budapest, Klauzál square 6.
