Primordial “Ooz-Ahh!”

About Primordial Ooz Ah!

“Primordial Oozah” finds Karsouny in typically playful mood. A series of paintings as striking as they are joyous, “Promordial Oozah” extends Karsouny’s reclamation of flatness and brash, morphing colour from the digital image, moving into a territory that the software simply can’t (yet) follow. The stark edges and clone stamp repetition of previous digitally influenced paintings are usurped here by freewheeling fun; meandering brush work, planes of bright pinks and turquoise’s melting into one another, playfully suggestive shapes, hand painted text. These images are warmer - the cool distance of Karsouny’s digital, post analog works feels some distance away from the humanity and rawness of these painterly works. A painstaking process of reproduction, from software born JPEG’s to art fair oils, is replaced here by a joyful energy, an altogether human, vulnerable hand on the brush. There is a vouching for childlike wonder here, and indeed ‘kids’ are mentioned in scrawled and pleasingly loose type, albeit one that emerges in spite (and total understanding) of the rules rather than in ignorance of them. Karsouny takes the baton here, a lineage traced back to Picasso’s efforts to reclaim a kind of flatness in painting, a flatness that Karsouny has spotted being potently reborn and reimagined digitally on our very own screens. Again, in contrast to the meticulous process of transforming those planes of digital pixels into towering oil paintings, these paintings bear the hallmarks of an intuitive,even instinctive, process. Karsouny maps the canvas, daubs of bright yellow, flashes of red, balanced by heavier tones, dominant shapes, weaving around the previous mark. A visual game of chess is played, until.....checkmate: the image is finely balanced, tuned, precise whilst impossibly playful and performative. At play here is an intuitive process, an interpretive dance on the canvas, a paradox of the planned and spontaneous works of the artist. Can the digital realm ever be this human? Karsouny believes so and creates at the gates where both meet.