Close Looking No. 1: Lasted
Christina Habibi
Lasted, 2026
30 × 40 × .75 inches
Acrylic, spray paint and oil on canvas
Painting details & availability →
In Lasted, I’m interested in how close a form can come to becoming something recognizable without ever fully arriving there. The large biomorphic shapes suggest bodies, machines, containers, or fragments of architecture, but I don’t want any of those readings to become definitive. I like the moment when I think I know what I’m looking at and then the painting shifts away from it.
I don’t start with a predetermined image. One decision creates the conditions for another, and forms often emerge through the process of painting. A loose contour might suggest something worth following. A sprayed passage can change the direction of a shape. Something accidental can suddenly become important. I may develop it, cover it, contradict it, or leave it alone.
That is part of why earlier stages remain so visible in Lasted. I don’t necessarily correct a previous decision just because the painting has moved somewhere else. Some marks are buried but remain partially visible; others survive several changes and end up serving a completely different purpose. I want the painting to retain some evidence of the decisions that brought it into being.
Color works in a similar way. The acid green, black, gray, pink, red, and pale green aren’t there simply to fill shapes. They establish weight, push forms forward, allow others to recede, or disrupt something that has become too settled. Some passages accumulate density while others remain relatively exposed, and I use that difference to keep the surface moving.
Text enters my paintings as another kind of mark. Words, letters, and fragments of handwriting may be readable, but I don’t use them to explain the image or provide a narrative. I’m interested in the point where reading and looking begin to overlap, where a word can carry meaning for a moment and then fall back into the painting as line, shape, or gesture.
I’m also interested in the relationships that emerge between forms. In Lasted, the larger shapes seem aware of one another. They push against each other, overlap, interrupt, and sometimes appear to accommodate one another. There is tension without a clear aggressor and movement without an obvious destination. Whatever is happening between them seems capable of changing.
That feels increasingly familiar outside of painting. We live with enormous pressure to identify things quickly, to decide what belongs where, what side something is on, and what something means. People, places, borders, communities, and even versions of ourselves are continually being named and sorted. The space between categories can become difficult to occupy.
Painting gives me a place where I don’t have to make those distinctions so quickly. A form can resemble several things at once. It can appear to be becoming something while also moving away from it. Two shapes can be in conflict without one of them needing to win. Something can belong to more than one visual world at the same time.
That is one reason abstraction continues to matter to me. I don’t think of it as an escape from the world. It can absorb the conditions around us without illustrating them. Text, fragments of bodies, spray-painted marks, erasure, humor, interruption, and competing visual languages can exist together without being organized into a single explanation.
In Lasted, even the distinction between abstraction and figuration keeps moving. A gesture becomes a form; a form begins to suggest an identity; then another mark changes it again. Recognition appears briefly and disappears. What seemed stable becomes provisional.
I want to preserve that state because I’m suspicious of how quickly we are asked to turn incomplete information into certainty. There are things we encounter before we have language for them, identities that don’t fit comfortably inside a single category, and situations whose meaning changes depending on where we stand.
Lasted doesn’t offer a way out of that condition. It stays inside it.
The painting keeps changing under the act of looking.