Luz Carabaño

Hoffman Donahue is pleased to present currents, a solo exhibition of work by Luz Carabaño. Requiring a close gaze to appreciate her expansive and intricate hand, Carabaño’s paintings and drawings feature delicately softened subjects, each image suspended on a spectrum of legibility. Her small-scale linen canvases have been gessoed and sanded to create a smooth, silky surface where each mark sits on the brink of clarity. This particular body of work is very much about vision itself, rendering ocular experiences and encounters with the external world. Each image proposes a different way of looking, Carabaño’s sustained inquiry into painting’s capacity to recalibrate the eye.

Alongside painting, Carabaño maintains a drawing and bookmaking practice. By default, books have a tactile intimacy. She approximates that same posture through visibly handmade works that slow the eyes and mind, adjust our pace and sense of time, and make room for observant stillness. en cinco planos takes this aim a step further, introducing a sculptural element through display on a table instead of a wall. This drawing — comprised of sequential sheets of paper with an airy lift in between each fold — gestures towards a semi- informality. The paper Carabaño selected is textured enough to see each individual fiber intertwined, but subdued enough that she can obscure or accentuate its grittiness depending on pressure exerted by her hand. With papers of varying length, Carabaño insinuates a rhythm of short and long notes.

When mounted on a wall, Carabaño’s paintings punctuate the space. Some subjects are difficult to recognize, but almost every painting starts with her own literal observation. Most of the abstraction emerges from abstraction studied in the real world, when unintentional patterns form striking visual intrigue. matriz corresponds to wear on a cart that’s been used to transport crates of beer: rubbed, tarnished, and weathered into a grid. Divisions, quadrants, intersections, and expansion from the center repeat as compositional touchstones because they are what Carabaño intuitively comes across in her own life. At times her paintings amplify texture, reminiscent of a graphite drawing partially erased. Others embrace a placid flatness charged by her irregularly shaped canvases. Soft grays, blues, green, and browns were once shadows on curtains, or a sun-bleached succulent, or the pattern of a dying leaf. Close scrutiny is what turns these observations from quotidian to wondrous.

Luz Carabaño (b. 1995, Venezuela) 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. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Nina Johnson, Miami; Super Super Markt, Berlin; Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles; Lulu, Mexico City; Larder, Los Angeles; and april april, New York. Carabaño’s work has been included in recent group exhibitions at Pomona College, Claremont, CA; Casemore Gallery, San Francisco, CA; and Galerie Greta Meert, Brussels, Belgium. In 2021, Carabaño was the recipient of UCLA’s Helen Frankenthaler Award in Painting. Carabaño lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.