PRESS

Positive Absurdism Show Preview via Le Wow Honest Art Reviews

Organic shapes in garish colors, swirling around as unhinged volutes, roam about Michel Karsouny’s canvases, in constant flux. Save for seeming accidents, like the odd drip or unblended brushstrokes, everything is flat. But if there is a certain flatness and bravado to Karsouny’s work, sensuality and playfulness have replaced Greenbergian modernist self-seriousness.

Although all seems unrestrained, it gradually appears there is a method to Karsouny’s apparently spontaneous all-over compositions, in the way he creates correspondences within them, and accents emerge to punctuate one’s eye’s journey, drawing it in, out of and around the canvas. Blurred outlines and interlaced shapes’ constant connection and disconnection seem relevant to our uncertain digital times.

Karsouny infuses joy back into painting, often displaying a not-quite-dionysiac, yet definitely an eager and earnest approach to artmaking. Describing his standpoint as “positive absurdism,” he appears to be on a quest to elicit a certain spontaneous meditative joy. The paintings, in fact, demand to suspend thought processes to focus on vision to and perhaps enter an introspective journey. They are entirely self-referential, with no symbol or shape pointing to anything outside the canvas, neither physical nor notional. They say nothing about their maker, or their origins. They call little attention to  process, and attempt to refute visual analysis. Yet, this is not art for art’s sake, but art that shifts the focus back to feeling.

Jim Blake reviews "The Untitled One" 

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.

Continue reading the full review here

PAINTING

The work is moving forward in different ways; Karsouny has been building on the abstract work he made in December, but since he is in New York and have limited space, he has been working on a higher number of small-size studies instead through acrylic paintings, charcoal drawings, and digital matte paintings.

Karsouny has two painting series in development: one that’s figurative, symbolic, and narrative-oriented, and the second is a continuation of the abstract painting started at SVA and the show at Emmanuel Guiragossian’s. Here are some in-studio works in the making.

His latest painting research is related to color. He has been interested in the color field painting movement of the 1960s, depth psychology (Neo-Jungian theory) and theology. In a nutshell, Karsouny is very curious about the way color can affect the viewer … Mark Rothko comes to mind. He is excited about the next year's coming paintings revolving around the subject.

SHOWS

MACAM contemporary art museum group show (September '19)

(Event Page) – BLESSINGS GENERATOR
This year Karsouny had the chance to participate in two non-painting contemporary art shows. For the MACAM September technology group show, he created a web based “infinite blessings generator” in response to the addictive social media algorithm based dopamine inducing “Likes” economy that has polarized the connected world’s attention. The piece is a combination of a website with a suitable museum install. The generator, which is accessed through a computer, tablet or phone provides users with an inexhaustible number of "Blessings" after they write their name and fill the text box with whatever is on their hearts and minds.

Albedo contemporary group show (October '19) – The Womb (Albedo)

Another conceptual group show Karsouny is in—the Albedo—opens this October 26 at KED’s in Beirut. Since Albedo’s theme this year revolves around the occult, He is developing a performance piece to build awareness around the all-encompassing (and usually invisible) Womb in which the world finds itself contained, above and below, inside and out. The idea is to highjack the show’s meaning by distributing alternative press releases to the audience through a performance to have them question their thoughts on the space and the role they play in it.

Emmanuel Guiragossian (May and September '19)

Group shows (Picture Gallery)
Through Emmanuel Guiragossian Karsouny has participated in two painting group shows, one at the museum in May and another this September Le Grey in the context of Beirut Art Week

LAB: MEME PROJECT

Internet memes as an alternative language and art medium: In parallel, Karsouny is experimenting with Memes and creative writing on Instagram through my channel “Life of a Lebanese Artist.” The medium joins GIFs (animated pop culture clips) with text to create a third meaning. This project keeps him up to date with internet culture while developing my writing skills and cultural savvy. A few links:

• Life of a Lebanese Artist on Instagram

• Here’s an interview on the subject with Karsouny’s wife Jenny on her Pivot podcast

• An art review by Le Waw (online modern and contemporary art review platform based in Lebanon)