Karma presents Cease Making Sense, an exhibition of recent work by Henni Alftan, open by means of January 11, 2025, at 549 West twenty sixth Avenue, New York.
Alftan’s oil work are sometimes recursive, commenting on the circumstances of their existence each as particular person work and as associatively linked to 1 one other. Working with photos which might be, in her phrases, “not reasonable however supply a believable suggestion of the seen world,” she explores how portray’s important parts—resembling colour, type, and composition—can convey maximal subtext with minimal visible info. The works in Cease Making Sense each suggest continuity and refute it, with sure canvases echoing and framing the opposite as they revel within the tensions created when a picture’s promise of wholeness is disrupted.
In Alftan’s renderings of portals and mirrors, area is flattened, compressing picture and substrate right into a single floor: we will not often see by means of them, and once we do, the topic on the opposite facet has been reworked into motif fairly than illustration. In Electrical Gentle (2024), geometric blocks of colour reveal themselves to be home windows by means of contextual clues, fairly than the transparency of glass: a grid of pastel gentle obscures any glimpse into the goings-on contained in the constructing that’s the topic of this picture. The cool glow of the monochromatic display screen in TV (2024) might be the perpetrator, however Alftan solely affords photos, by no means explanations. A concentrated beam of daffodil-yellow rays streams by means of Arched Window (2023), whereas the titular topic’s form rhymes with a window in Karma’s Chelsea gallery.
In her work of figures, Alftan usually represents the physique in fragments, withholding totalities to immediate the viewer to fill within the clean area with their very own creativeness. The diptych Black Umbrella (In-between) (2023) is hung such that the hole between the 2 panels, every of which depicts one facet of an individual in a crimson sweater defending themselves from rain, occupies the realm the place the determine’s face would logically match—as such, any sense of id is denied. For Knees (2024), Alftan crops in carefully to a pair of crossed legs, painted as steady fields of peach and noticed with blurry purple bruises that index an earlier, unseen accident. Cigarette (Déja-vu) (2023), one other diptych, portrays a cigarette when it’s first lit and once more as soon as it has burned down. The brilliant-orange cherry grows as the remaining shrinks, visually representing the passage of time. These close-ups and moments when time jumps ahead replicate the affect of the cinematic idea hors-champ, or that which occurs off-screen.
Tombstone (2023) employs an identical method—cropping into the nook of a slab marbled with bordeaux and grey, Alftan reveals an inscription studying “ALFTA” that cuts off abruptly on the canvas’s edge, midway by means of the second A. Slightly than an artist’s signature, expressive of their vitality and presence, the tombstone inscription may index the loss of life of the creator. Alternatively, the textual content on the stone might be a misdirection, pointing to not the artist however to a different similarly-named individual—the crop permits for a number of interpretations. The Studio III (2024) anchors the exhibition, collating the shadow of an artist holding a paintbrush with the left fringe of The Bay (Day) (2024) and the correct facet of Arched Window. The shared palette of the latter two work suggests a connection; The Studio solidifies this hyperlink—a ghostly reminder that the true thread connecting these photos is the painter herself, all the time current in her absence. Putting her tightly-stitched works into relation with one another, Alftan affirms the mnemonic operate of portray itself.
All photos courtesy of Karmakarma.org
