Close Looking No. 1

Christina Habibi

Lasted, 2026
30 × 40 × .75 inches
Acrylic, spray paint and oil on canvas

In Lasted, large biomorphic forms occupy the canvas without ever becoming fully identifiable. They suggest bodies, machines, containers, or fragments of architecture, but each possibility remains provisional. The painting offers recognition, then shifts away from it.

That movement between abstraction and figuration gives the work much of its tension. Forms seem to emerge through loose contours, dense passages, sprayed color, and abrupt changes in direction. They appear to take shape almost in real time, as though the painting is allowing one visual idea to provoke the next rather than working toward a predetermined image.

Some areas feel open and exposed while others accumulate weight. Color is not simply filling shapes but helping to establish their presence, push them forward, or allow them to recede. Acid green, black, gray, pink, red, and pale green move between structure and atmosphere, keeping the surface active without allowing any one element to dominate for long.

Language enters the painting in much the same way. Words, letters, and fragments of handwriting appear across the surface but do not explain what is happening. They operate alongside line, gesture, and color, sometimes becoming readable and sometimes dissolving back into the larger field of marks. Reading and looking begin to overlap.

The painting also makes its own history visible. Earlier passages remain beneath later ones, and shifts in density, color, and gesture suggest repeated revision. Some marks are covered without disappearing entirely; others seem to survive changes in direction and take on new roles as the image develops.

This accumulation is central to Habibi’s process. She does not construct the painting toward a fixed destination. One decision creates the conditions for another. A form can emerge accidentally and then be developed, obscured, contradicted, or abandoned. Earlier decisions are not necessarily corrected when the painting changes direction; they remain part of the surface and part of the work’s visual memory.

The result is an image that feels active without becoming chaotic. Dense passages sit beside quieter ones. Gesture interrupts structure, while structure occasionally seems to emerge from gesture. Recognizable forms come forward and recede again, leaving the viewer in a continuous state of reassessment.

There is also a strong sense of relationship within the painting. The larger forms seem aware of one another, creating the possibility of encounter without establishing a clear narrative. At moments they feel confrontational; at others they appear strangely companionable. The painting never confirms what that relationship is, and the ambiguity becomes part of its energy.

Habibi’s paintings emerge from the long history of gestural abstraction, but they are equally shaped by the visual density of the present. Their layered surfaces recall the physicality and immediacy of postwar painting while remaining open to text, fragments of figuration, spray-painted marks, and the compressed visual language of contemporary life. Rather than treating abstraction as a closed historical language, Habibi uses it as something still evolving, capable of absorbing writing, imagery, erasure, humor, and contradiction without losing its physical force.

In Lasted, abstraction and figuration are not opposing positions. They continually interfere with one another. A gesture can become a form; a form can lose its identity and return to gesture. Meaning appears briefly, changes direction, and gives way to another possibility.

Habibi leaves that instability intact. The painting does not ask the viewer to discover a correct image hidden inside abstraction. Instead, recognition itself becomes part of the work’s movement. The eye proposes possibilities and withdraws them, repeatedly reorganizing what it sees.

The painting keeps changing under the act of looking.