Everything in Karolina Albricht’s paintings seems to be doing two (or more) things at the same time. Amid a patchwork of creeping mats of colour, possible images of uncertain objects begin to coalesce. These objects never materialise, however, but are endlessly making and unmaking themselves before our eyes.

In the studio are pages and books of delicate linear drawings in pencil and gouache. Unexpectedly, Karolina’s inscribed lines are not given as the route for leading the eye in and through the drawings, instead these lines forge the edges of spaces for the looking-eye to occupy. In paintings such as Deposit Conversion and Little Rhythms worked-up from these drawings, the lines and contours continue this intent of forcing the viewer to navigate each painting from within. It’s as if in the act of looking deeply and slowly into and across the surfaces of stained or encrusted oil colour we are able to inhabit a sequence of nooks and niches, caves and enclosures. 

Karolina’s process is an open-ended succession of micro-decisions which only make sense in relation to the becoming of the painting being pursued. These decisions each leave their trace, even when they are subsequently abandoned or nuanced. Evidence of changes-of-mind, reversals, or new directions are rich vulnerabilities written into the paintings, so, in looking and seeing these, the paintings resist becoming static but are charged with multiple, parallel possibilities – those taken, and those tested and abandoned. Looking then, feels quite close to the act of painting, we read the what if at the same time as we witness the consequence of the decision made; the path taken.

The developing surface collects different painting-actions which are means of slowing or delaying the transit of the eye through the painting-space(s). In Downside Up the heavy, leaning arch-form is experienced in a counter-clockwise direction as our eye alights on the articulated flurry of rust-coloured marks set in tension with, and umbilically connected to, the reaching diagonal of the lower (closer?) green form. Following the route of the frame-like orange line, but somehow existing beneath its floating presence, we track the passage of the arch, eventually becoming enmeshed and enmired in a densely puckered patch of red. The magnetic pull toward this sticky coagulation of red matter is as much because of its stuff-ness as because of the intrigue it provokes as we attempt to know how, and why, this welted field is achieved. An escape from this hot centre of the picture comes in the unlikely vehicle of a tiny wayward drip of gesso, its presence, evidence of a momentary studio accident. The journey of looking, having slowed almost to a stop in the dense red passage, is re-engaged through the dynamic possibility of this white drip causing us to begin, once again, to consider the tilted stained field in the lower half of the painting which hosts the improbable and beguiling green object.

The polyglot possibilities of the way paint is applied is not the only way that these paintings grow and change. In Upward, Not Northward large, roughly-cut sections of the same raw flax onto which the painting is made are later collaged back into the painting-in-progress. These passages are either left unpainted (as in the triangle shape in the lower left corner), or open-up a new surface for new forms to be introduced into the composition (such as the section in the top-half of the picture which enables the yellow tube-like shape to become draped over a scrubbed grey-pink space).

Changes of mind in the development of the painting, from a gentle shift in paint thickness to the brute covering-over of large passages of painting with raw jute cause the paintings to teeter on the threshold of being ‘right’. The sequence of complex judgements and actions involved in its studio-making are unapologetically given to the viewer for us to re-rehearse and to re-enact as if by proxy through the act of looking. Looking involves a series of reflexive questions, all fundamentally wrapped-up in the idiosyncrasies and peculiarities of studio-decision-making, such as why put-down this brush to pick-up that brush? Or why allow a colour area to find this contour and not any number of other possible edges? Where once we revelled in the paintings of Elizabeth Murray or Gillian Ayers as being badly behaved or wilful or awkward, now, when we find those same characteristics within Karolina’s paintings, they manifest for us true hope of liveness. Asking might this be ‘right’? seems more profound, more eloquently fringed in doubt, than bending all decisions toward coherency or resolution (i.e., deadness).

So, what about those sort-of images which populate these palimpsest-riven colour fields? The green object at the front of Downside Up is a kind of swing-seat-cum-pool-float and yet it is neither of those things. Grounded on the rug-like orange rectangle and tethered upward as if suspended, the green thing is seat-like enough for the viewer to feel complicit with the picture, as if we might perch upon it a while, and from there navigate through and around the painting. In the top half of Little Rhythms, a curved plane suggests the wall of a can or bucket, above which an elongated soft red form is connected into its well. Whether this creeping matter is emerging from or filling the can is unclear. The painting – as each of these paintings do – appears to be endlessly emptying and filling itself from within. Everything is happening. And because looking is a mobile and active engagement, the paintings do not – they cannot – remain still.