Is it not terrible, that an object’s worth is entirely dependent on an individual’s experience of the object? One of life’s greatest tragedies and most magnificent triumphs, it seems, is that one can never truly and exactly impart their specific experience of an object upon another. This great discrepancy between object and experience–and the moves made to negotiate the disparity–serves as the primary impetus for most art, music, prose: how does one exactly eloquate their own fraught understanding of an object through experience? Venezuelan-born and Los Angeles-based artist, Luz Carabaño, is mired in these representational complexities. Her latest exhibition, encuentros, on view at Hannah Hoffman Gallery through October 21, deals in the intricacies of articulation. 

Toying with the realm of the unfamiliar, encuentros suggests shape, flirts with it, prods it and interpolates it, but never consigns it to recognizability. Instead, the exhibition fixates on the cerebral: where much art communicates experience, encuentros facilitates it. Throughout the installation, Carabaño has manipulated the sculptural elements and shapes of the canvases on which her paintings rest, allowing content and form to converse with one another in a language of its own making. The gallery itself, enforces a hyper-awareness of one’s own presence within the space. The incident of being, the occurrence of communication, and the process of cognition–the most commonplace parts of lived experience–are made foreign in encuentros, imparting upon the viewer a heightened sense of that original discrepancy, that between object and understanding.