COLORS, TEMPORALITY AND MOVEMENT AT KAREN HUBER GALLERY

What came first? The name or the fruit? – Derek Jarman, Chroma: A Book Of Color

Pure color talks, it has a language of its own that naturally communicates visions and leaves lasting impressions. From a physics standpoint, it is a visual perception within the electromagnetic spectrum. It is not an inherent property of matter, yet, for most humans, color becomes inexorably linked to objects, emotions, nationalities, activities, and places. For Kristi Kongi color transcends mere aesthetics— it is her primary medium of artistic expression. Serving as a journalistic device to document her everyday life and keep track of the incessant rhythm of the passing of time and a means to comprehend the fascinating boundlessness of light.

Kongi has used painting to create a vibrant oasis within the gallery walls —a space nestled deep in the urban belly where visitors can pause for a therapeutic color bath. Throughout the work, the sky, as an allegory, is woven across many of the canvases. Taking center stage as the main color of Kongi’s palette, thus becoming a symbol of unbounded movement. This celestial hue embodies the atmosphere containing, nurturing, transporting and filtering the gasses and waves that describe our world. In her artistic realm, this communal celestial sphere represents a democratic space, transcending the traditional notion of heaven and its promise of paradise.

Intriguing parallelisms emerge between Léon Spilliaert’s evocative atmospheres and Kongi’s painting, despite their chromatic disparities, both artists deploy shape and color — in the form everyday objects, plants, fragments of ghoulish bodies — to articulate distinct states of mind that evoke deeply subjective and expressive atmospheres that resonate with viewers.

A painter with a fully developed sense of spatiality, Kongi skillfully extends paint beyond the canvas, transforming rooms into immersive installations. Stepping into these atmospheres, one is immediately overwhelmed with an array of sensations produced by the combination of two physical phenomena: shape and electromagnetic wavelengths (light in the form of color). This approach, reminiscent of Miriam Cahn’s use of brush and color to communicate emotions, navigates an unconventional use of paint and dimension as powerful tools to document life and elicit profound emotional responses.

Kristi Kongi’s installations tell of the peaceful journey of particles crossing space, oblivious to borders, inevitably inciting us to contemplate the state of the world around us. Each painting serves as a self-portrait, and every title becomes an opportunity to write a poem.

–Yes Escobar.

The past, the present, the future. It is like indigo, lilac and magenta by artist Kristi Kongi.

Until January, 2024.

Karen Huber Gallery. Bucareli 120-piso 1, Colonia Centro, Centro, Cuauhtémoc, México City, México.