Karen Black: Gentle Pulse

How do we feel when we think about softness? Does the term delicate suggest weakness, or can it represent something more considered or generous? For her upcoming exhibition Gentle Pulse, Karen Black has been using words as triggers to shape her work, relishing in the potential for misunderstanding.

By Elyse Goldfinch

Karen Black, Crushed butterfly dream, 2022, oil on canvas 61.3cm x 46 cm

Photo: Mark Pokorny

Gentle Pulse begins with language. Taking words such as soft, delicate, gentleness and care as a starting point, the exhibition complicates their definition by focusing on what emotions they bring up, rather than what they represent. How do we feel when we think about softness? Does the term delicate suggest weakness, or can it represent something more considered or generous? Karen Black interprets words as triggers or principles from which to shape image, sculpture, light and tone. Relishing in the potential for misunderstanding, the words Black lingers on are elusive, open-ended and difficult to define.

Through the exhibition Black aims to rethink artistic practice as something that can be more open, more kind, more soft, more loving. These are not words commonly associated with the logical, rational art world but claim a different space. Radical care is a form of resistance against hierarchical and patriarchal convention. It requires slowness, consideration, community and strength. To strive for gentleness is a deeply personal and largely transformative philosophy for art and for life.

Karen Black, After the rain comes the sun, 2022, oil on canvas 213.6 cm x 198.5 cm

Photo: Mark Pokorny

Gentleness is an active participant in the exhibition; a radical shift from the density of Black’s earlier paintings. The staging of those earlier works has been stripped away to uncover something more primordial. Decelerating the process amplifies the softness of the artist’s brush. Intentionally slowing down the painting process, every layer is cleverly placed, with much of the canvas left blank. The negative spaces feel intensely vulnerable in their exposure, yet there is a staunch power in Black’s refusal to touch them. A physical and emotional void. In its presence and absence, the hand of the artist is tender throughout.

Held within the tension between the canvas and paint, Black presents whispers of things recognisable only through glimpses of shadow and shape. Interiors and exteriors bleed into one another, yet her use of framing in this body of work encloses the image. We see people trapped within the thresholds and boundaries of doorways and windows, but they remain porous, blurred. Each painting a memory of a memory, transforming hybrid images into a singular mis-on-scène. Embodied within the archaeology and layers of luminous surface, each character lays itself bare.

The scale of bodies is also unusual, in some they take up the entire canvas, where in others they are pushed to the edges. In one painting, a figure wanders into the frame, as if by accident. They are in a state of human-animal metamorphosis. Their face separates from their body, falling to the ground, as the head of a horse emerges atop their shoulder. In another, a figure appears on the ground with limbs flailing, possibly in the process of being crushed by the weight of a giant mass that takes up most of the canvas. Black describes this mass as a ‘vortex’. An energy field that can represent healing and self-exploration, and as a place ‘where the earth seems to be especially alive with energy’. So, is the figure being crushed, or are they in a state of becoming?

Karen Black, I will shade you from the world, 2022, oil on canvas 213.6 cm x 198.5 cm

Photo: Mark Pokorny

Bodies are fluid things, liquified through paint. Corporeal beings float along the surface of the canvas but are often disjointed and detached. Black takes exercise diagrams as reference material to examine how the body distorts when it squats, rotates and bends in unusual ways. Active poses captured and reassembled. No longer whole but precariously poised to adapt new forms. Limbs from one figure may actually belong to another, held within a distorted version of downward-facing dog. The representation of bodies continues in Black’s bronze and ceramic sculptures. These objects also resist traditional depictions of bodies with their torsos sliced and stacked atop unsteady bases. Genderless and unselfconscious, they fit together perfectly.

Rejecting a mimetic representation of the world, the paintings invite multiple readings. Always ambiguous and tenuous to grasp, each work a slow revelation of something else unexpected. The work engenders an unconscious bond between desire and repulsion, gentleness and strength, fragility and domination. Black forces her audience to recognise that we both eroticise and are horrified by that which we don’t understand. Distorted faces and figures are either elongated or flattened beyond recognition. They should cause discomfort yet this is offset by the beauty in the colours and textures. Just when they could topple into transgression, Black pulls them back. These contrasts illuminate their own ambivalence, as the works never take a singular position. Instead, they recognise their inability to be defined. Like language, the paintings contain images that may be misinterpreted or misjudged, but they are incommunicable by nature—the misnomer is in the making.

Bodies are fluid things, liquified through paint. Corporeal beings float along the surface of the canvas but are often disjointed and detached.

Karen Black, Room for sentences, 2022, oil on canvas 61.3 x 46 cm

Photo: Mark Pokorny

The works contain simultaneously contrasting emotions such as seduction and violence, lust and foreboding. An internal matrix of human emotion takes effect, asking questions about what it is to relate to one another but also how we relate to ourselves. How we interact with those closest to us. How we stay vulnerable while protecting ourselves. The way we are entwined within these messy tangles of contradictions. Black asks these questions of herself too, alluding to self-portraiture and self-reflection throughout the body of work. The full spectrum of human relations is expressed through Black’s vision of the world, unearthed with paint, texture and material.

The exhibition begins as it ends—with words. Among the paintings and sculptures is a neon light that reads feelings, rendered in the artists’ own handwriting. Black is constantly unearthing new ways of using language in her practice, from the poetics of her artwork titles to the incorporation of text in her more recent exhibitions. feelings is directly lifted from one of Black’s many sketchbooks that she uses to constantly accumulate drawings and notes to herself and as prompts for her work. By transforming this abstract, fleeting thought into a neon light, she breathes new life into it.

Karen Black, Losing my mind (detail), 2022, oil on canvas 183 x 228.5 cm

Photo: Mark Pokorny

The constant pulsating of the neon sits somewhere between a solid and gas, never fixed, yet given form. This pulse is a rhythm, a heartbeat, a steady vibration. It is a call for slowness, self-care and deep connection between the artist, the work and the audience.

EXHIBITION: KAREN BLACK, GENTLE PULSE, 24 NOV – 17 DEC 2022, S+S SYDNEY

+ EMAIL ART@SULLIVANSTRUMPF.COM TO REQUEST A PREVIEW