The return to flatness beginning in the early 19th century with Delacroix’s dabs followed by Manet’s bold outlines and then the retinal-occipital barrage of the Impressionists. Late Cezanne puts a nail in the coffin of illusions of pictorial depth. The oscillating picture plane returns to the surface of the canvas from the ultra-deep horizon of Altdorfer’s over-populated “Darius and Alexander”. The dissolution of 500 years of entrenched spatial sleight-of-hand by Cezanne’s one-two punch: facture and passage and its enshrinement in Braquasso’s Cubism, aka: “Cezanne for Dummies”. Michael Karsouny knows this history and he has an intuitive grasp of Saussurean semiotics as he weaves his way across this bold canvas revealing his generation’s book-end to Cubism. If one is painting in the 21st century, you cannot not know Cubism.
Every generation of painters since Picasso unveiled “Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon” delivers its bookend to Picasso’s paradigm-shifting masterpiece. Karsouny’s “Ooza” is our monument, our re-statement of the destruction-creation of the Renaissance paradigm. Ontogeny (Karsouny’s painting for our moment) recapitulating phylogeny (the 200- year history of a return to flatness). This phylogeny must be studied by a serious painter. A painter cannot not know the history of the art. To destroy without knowing what one has destroyed is to create with blindness. Karsouny knows the history of the narrative pictorial space he has marginalized here. He understands the heuristics of Western space-making: linear and aerial perspective, the spiraling, hierarchical composition, obsessive paint application, atelier-generated un-natural color choice, salon-scale, salon subject. “Ooza” is a monument to destruction-creation, a re-telling, a reiteration. This Omnimodern canvas communicates on a cascading hierarchy of symbols from garden-variety Freud-Jung-Maslow deep into his private semiotics of destruction-insemination. Karsouny injects our moment with this summation.
In “Ooza” Karsouny orchestrates the variables in play in any painting ever played out on a two-dimensional surface from paleolithic cave wall to 21st Century canvas. The rhythm of the edges here in “Ooza” creates a bebop parade around the perimeter. Free of aciephobia (fear of edges) Karsouny joyously says “Edges be damned!”. His distribution of the unifying structural effects of white space are boldly developed with a colossal irregular “X” – a chromosome-like armature for the entire composition. “Ooza” relates the neuro-optics of hue and tone perception; literal and phenomenal transparency as well as simultaneity at work via Joseph Albers, Colin Rowe, and Robert Slutzsky. Karsouny addresses the uses and effects of scale throughout, i.e. how many square inches of a particular hue, color-balance, color shape and distribution via broad-brush or narrow, tube-borne line. A jazzy balance is the result. Karsouny’s savvy reading of Cezanne-Braquasso’s facture serves as eye-alarm – rat-a-tat-tat interplay of saturated hue and its tints (see: 18 dun-colored dabs at lower left) followed by a swerve on the bold but small zinc-yellow geometric figures.
Karsouny’s painting is an act of creation as real as the evolution of the first lipid membrane at a deep ocean thermal vent in Hadean times – first moves for all subsequent cellular life: plant or animal. Who or what makes the following move? And moves after that?–all following swerves, mutations, revisions, inventions, and combinations are selected by, and driven by, fitness or lack thereof. The relation to the first moves. First moves are enshrined or obscured. Their presence is forever felt. If they work – they work !
Karsouny explores our shared symbols for things beyond un-aided vision; symbols that represent our knowledge of microscopic organisms and organelles. The classic graphic for this shorthand for the unseen (with naked eye) is the legendary double helix of the DNA molecule. Karsouny groks PoMo. His playful references to liberation theologies, semiotics: signs, symbols, and his private language. He explores and employs to great effect our shared public language: hierarchies of reference from the subconscious to the pan-cultural: cigar as cigar, fireworks and tunnels referring to sex act for all touched by Freud. Phalluses and vaginas subliminally rendered here and there across the painting. We see a load of magenta “semen” that has worked its way through the picture-spanning opening, upper right top edge to bottom left of canvas. DNA uncoils its coiled coils near the blissful drama of penetration, signaling fecundity, success, victory, union, joy. The cluster of orange “eggs” waits within. Synchronic (history is a sin) and diachronic (history is our friend) referents acknowledge Cezanne’s destruction of the 500-year Renaissance narrative. Karsouny generates a synchronic vocabulary of form, color, and symbol pulling out all Saussurean stops as he reaches through space AND time to deliver his message of joy.
A painting can appear to be non-objective at the scale of everyday solids and voids – persons, places, things animate and inanimate, i.e. a completely gestural abstraction and at the same time recall realistic images of cellular structures known readily to the microbiologist. Karsouny’s painting tells the story of membrane bilayer protein transduction as if “Ooza” was a diagram in a biology text. The organic joy exhibited in this painting is Dionysian, the rigorous structure- Apollonian. The color balance is the stuff of academic classicism, yet the picture plane has been democratized – no hint of absolutism. This work is intensely tectonic, i.e. we see how it is made – no secrets here. The structure is expressed, not hidden. Lessons abound for all painters.
How does a painting mean (see: John Ciardi on poetry) How does a painting communicate joy? What are the tricks and tropes, the method and madness? How is the magic of color, gesture, composition, and touch distributed so sublimely in field and ground? Karsouny has intuitions around Stella’s notion of “Working Space” – capturing-conveying depth in a convincing manner as exhibited here as subliminal narrative space and or abstract space. There is no phylogenic difference. Positive-negative space as revealed by Karsouny’s generating lines (per Le Corbusier) Yin-Yang, Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis – a Hegelian cornucopia, a Husserlian homage to bracketing for noetic resolution-revelation. Karsouny stratifies pictorial space from bottom to top with his sophisticated kit of strategies: implied time moving forward, layering of event upon event…..layering back to front as ideas overlap, spatial layering with color: cool is distant – warm is forward, and with tone: light is forward and dark is distant. PoMo ambiguities, contradictions, and complexities abound with the interchange of back to front interrogating elapsed time, forward is present. Karsouny exploring old-fashioned Cubist simultaneity with boldness in every corner this great canvas. A history lesson and a vision of the future of painting.
In closing, please note: there are now three names for our purple hue. One must mix equal amounts of red and blue for standard, middle-of-the-road purple – add more red to get repple – return to the 50-50 average of blue and red and add more blue for the bluples. Beginning from blue: it’s blue, bluple, purple, repple, and red. To say a color is purple leaves us in limbo. We do not know if we are warm or cool. Be specific. Karsouny uses repple and its tints to convey a light-hearted, unambiguous, energetic bliss. “Ooza” is a blissful bookend to “Les Demoiselles”. We have waited 112 years for an answer to Picasso’s masterpiece. The joy in Karsouny’s “Ooza” is a statement to all who paint and all who love painting. Long-live painting! It’s ALIIIIIVE.
