In a final sigh, the mysterious word resonates: rosebud…
PARIS-B is delighted to welcome the artist Laura Garcia Karras for her first solo show at the gallery, entitled «Rosebud», unveiling her latest paintings.
Borrowing from the end of Citizen Kane (1941) the title of her exhibition, Laura Garcia Karras begins a new series of paintings.
Rosebud reveals twelve oil paintings like a bouquet of flowerlike entities.
Emblems of the poet, of love, purity or femininity… Roses seem to be trapped in labels which fade any emancipation attempt. If Laura Garcia Karras paints this flower, it’s not for its symbolic charm: her roses assert themselves in a magnetic duality.
On their dark background, the artist’s roses sound like bewitching threats and resonate as they bloom in the ether of the canvas. Each bud “potentially” and “actually” bursts (according to Aristotle’s concept) to challenge the gaze, assert itself in front of us, and subvert the power games.
“The subject of my work? It’s painting, there are no other subjects. Naturally, I use elements that inspire me.
They can take different forms: music, a situation, a memory, a proclivity…
all of which move from the real to the imaginary.”
— Laura Garica Karras
In a moment of deep concentration, Laura Garcia Karras isolates each area to work on it as closely as possible. With the tip of her tool, she slowly caresses the oily material which tolerates no hesitation, no repentance. The shreds of paint then reveal their fibers, their raw flesh in a perfectly smooth, scratched composition. The paint areas never mix; each fragment divides into distinct fractals. Yet, their union forges a sudden symphony, an almost fateful crescendo, like an atomic explosion.
In the laboratory of her studio, Laura Garcia Karras sculpts the material with a scalpel and stretches paint with surgical precision. On canvases previously sketched out and then coated with wash, the chromatic palette ranges from light to dark, with gradations from sulfur to orange, passing through caramelized and spicy notes. No brushstrokes are visible, only the cut-outs of the shapes before coloring give a glimpse of the artist’s gestures.
If the works of Laura Garcia Karras raise questions about both the act of painting and the symbolism of figuration today, they also question our way of understanding a painting that disrupts the dynamics of seduction by tending towards their abolition.
“The sun’s glare opens the rosebuds by scalpel, slicing through the bulging flesh, cellulosic pulp, chloroplastic surgery, botanical stupor. The light, per its fiery rays, carve through these enrapturing beauties of heady essences.
Flowers blossom in the sun, and the sun makes flowers bloom.”
— “Les filles du feu” by Marie-Sarah Adenis
Catalogue of Works
Laura Garcia Karras (b.1988, Les Lilas, France) graduated from La Cambre, Brussels and then the Beaux-Arts de Paris. In 2018, she was the winner of the Concours Fondation Crédit Agricole in France and she won the third place of the Prix Antoine Marin, presented by Bernard Frize. She is now artist resident in the Poush Manifesto in Aubervilliers, France.