Close Looking No. 2
Christina Habibi
Super, 2026
30 × 40 × .75 inches
Acrylic, spray paint, oil and graphite on canvas
Painting details & availability →
In Super, I’m interested in the point where an abstract form begins to suggest a presence. The large red shape dominates the painting, but I never decided what it was supposed to be. It developed through painting and eventually became substantial enough that it seemed to have its own character. It can suggest a body, an animal, an object, or some combination of them, but I prefer that it remains between those possibilities.
I work by responding to what is already happening on the canvas. A shape gives me something to push against, a color changes the balance, or a line suddenly makes an area feel more specific than it did before. In Super, the red form became an organizing force, but I didn’t want the rest of the painting to simply support it. The smaller shapes, exposed drawing, drips, and interruptions continually compete with it.
That competition is important to me. I don’t want a painting to become so organized that the eye immediately understands where to go. There are areas in Super that feel heavy and compressed and others that open briefly. Bright blue and yellow appear in relatively small amounts but can pull attention away from much larger areas of red, gray, pink, and black. A small shift can change the balance of the whole painting.
Drawing and painting move back and forth throughout the surface. Some lines describe the edge of a form while others seem to ignore the forms completely. Brushstrokes can become contours, and drawn marks can suddenly make a painted area feel solid. I don’t think of drawing as something that happens before the painting. It remains active throughout the process and can redirect the image at any point.
The same is true of language. Words and fragments appear in Super, but I don’t use them as captions or clues. Sometimes I write something because of its meaning, sometimes because of the way the letters occupy a particular space, and sometimes the distinction between those things disappears. Once a word enters the painting, I can paint over it, interrupt it, or let it become part of another form.
What interests me most is how quickly we begin trying to identify what we see. The red form asks to be named almost immediately. It feels close enough to something familiar that the mind starts searching for a category, even though the painting never gives enough information to settle on one.
That impulse feels larger than painting. We move through a world that constantly asks things to become legible quickly. Images are labeled, people are categorized, events are reduced to positions, and ambiguity can feel like something that needs to be corrected. I’m interested in allowing the opposite condition to remain active on the canvas, where something can be strongly present without becoming completely defined.
In Super, the red form may initially seem to control the painting, but smaller incidents keep pulling attention elsewhere. A word becomes a mark, a mark begins to describe something, and a shape that seemed recognizable becomes strange again. The image keeps approaching definition and then moving away from it.
I want to leave those changes of identity open. I’m less interested in deciding what the red form is than in the pressure to decide. Recognition can be useful, but it can also close something down. For me, the painting stays active because it continues to resist that closure.
Something can be recognizable without becoming fixed.