Karma presents Stop Making Sense, an exhibition of new paintings by Henni Alftan, open through January 11, 2025, at 549 West 26th Street, New York.
Alftan’s oil paintings are often recursive, commenting on the conditions of their existence both as individual paintings and as associatively linked to one another. Working with images that are, in her words, “not realistic but offer a plausible suggestion of the visible world,” she explores how painting’s essential elements—such as color, form, and composition—can convey maximal subtext with minimal visual information. The works in Stop Making Sense both propose continuity and refute it, with certain canvases echoing and framing the other as they revel in the tensions created when an image’s promise of wholeness is disrupted.
In Alftan’s renderings of portals and mirrors, space is flattened, compressing image and substrate into a single surface: we can rarely see through them, and when we do, the subject on the other side has been transformed into motif rather than representation. In Electric Light (2024), geometric blocks of color reveal themselves to be windows through contextual clues, rather than the transparency of glass: a grid of pastel light obscures any glimpse into the goings-on inside the building that is the subject of this image. The cool glow of the monochromatic screen in TV (2024) could be the culprit, but Alftan only offers images, never explanations. A concentrated beam of daffodil-yellow rays streams through Arched Window (2023), while the titular subject’s shape rhymes with a window in Karma’s Chelsea gallery.
In her paintings of figures, Alftan often represents the body in fragments, withholding totalities to prompt the viewer to fill in the blank space with their own imagination. The diptych Black Umbrella (In-between) (2023) is hung such that the gap between the two panels, each of which depicts one side of a person in a red sweater protecting themselves from rain, occupies the area where the figure’s face would logically fit—as such, any sense of identity is denied. For Knees (2024), Alftan crops in closely to a pair of crossed legs, painted as continuous fields of peach and spotted with blurry purple bruises that index an earlier, unseen accident. Cigarette (Déja-vu) (2023), another diptych, portrays a cigarette when it is first lit and again once it has burned down. The bright-orange cherry grows as the rest shrinks, visually representing the passage of time. These close-ups and moments when time jumps forward reflect the influence of the cinematic concept hors-champ, or that which happens off-screen.
Tombstone (2023) employs a similar technique—cropping into the corner of a slab marbled with bordeaux and gray, Alftan shows an inscription reading “ALFTA” that cuts off abruptly at the canvas’s edge, halfway through the second A. Rather than an artist’s signature, expressive of their vitality and presence, the tombstone inscription might index the death of the author. Alternatively, the text on the stone could be a misdirection, pointing not to the artist but to another similarly-named person—the crop allows for multiple interpretations. The Studio III (2024) anchors the exhibition, collating the shadow of an artist holding a paintbrush with the left edge of The Bay (Day) (2024) and the right side of Arched Window. The shared palette of the latter two paintings suggests a connection; The Studio solidifies this link—a ghostly reminder that the real thread connecting these images is the painter herself, always present in her absence. Placing her tightly-stitched works into relation with each other, Alftan affirms the mnemonic function of painting itself.
All images courtesy of Karmakarma.org
