LAURA KARETZKY

“The window I see from my window has been there for as long as I have lived here, but recently I’ve noticed it more acutely. The distance is just far enough that my near-sighted eyes can’t make out specifics. Man or woman, about how old, I am not sure. At a kitchen table, perhaps? Reading or eating? Sometimes at 2am. I notice it. A single window illuminates a screen; a portal of life; in the dark and blank facade. Do they see me? Are they seeing me back? For the past 18 months, the rectangular box has become an obsessive reassurance of what exists outside my own self-distanced quarantine.”   – Laura Karetzky

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Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce Laura Karetzky: Concurrence, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from November 13 through December 22, 2021 with an opening reception to be held on Saturday, November 13th from 3:00 pm to 7:00 pm. Appointments are optional and may be made at luisdejesus.com/contact.

For many years, Laura Karetzky has been interested in the effect that communicating, specifically through technological means, has on perception. Since the pandemic, we have relied substantially on live-media platforms to perform our daily functions, and now we appear to be stuck somewhere between the real and virtual – a hybridization of witnessing the world, both in and around us. 

The phenomenon of being inside our bodies and outside, on other screens, in other windows, and in other places, has changed our understanding of space forever as the boundaries of each are merging. This has led Karetzky to question the images she sees in every aspect of her visual field. With this body of work, she addresses the story inside another story, a window in a window so to speak, superimposed or inherently found; life reinstated inside itself. 

Time and simultaneity are essential to Karetzky’s work. The base layer of the panel is considered the first window. Beginning on primed wood, the artist prepares colored, textured grounds to insinuate a history of abstract marks and patterns – much like the streaked and fingerprinted surface of a smartphone or tablet. Embedded points-of-view are conveyed through her “box inside a box” composition, evocative of how we often engage with multiple “screens.” 

The high-key chroma of each panel are references to color filters, and she further contrasts color and space with brushstrokes of varying degrees of looseness and precision. Together, this distinctive visual vocabulary employed across the body of work reveals an underlying theory that any of these paintings could be the window of another and could thus suggest the friction between there and here, both.