Assembled Labor: Julius Karoubi

Julius Karoubi's artworks are not paintings, but they're not so far from being paintings that you can't test out the idea that they might be. Echoes of Matisse, traces of Pop Art, but also something structuralist and programmatic in its methods - Robert Ryman maybe - and then something much more West Coast and postmodern. Freestyle, but it's controlled, not at all expressionistic. Just as in any other discipline, you put in the hard work so you can make it look easy. You assemble the labour.

One reason that Karoubi's artworks are not paintings is that half of them are mirrors. Of course, they aren't actual mirrors, but they're close enough that you can ask, in what way are they not mirrors? The cast of a mosaic reflects that mosaic, but nothing else. It doesn't, for example, reflect you as you look at it. Still it really, physically doubles something that was really in the world, and in that sense it's more powerful than a regular mirror, which can only reflect light.

What is most different, between the mosaics and the cast reflections, is that the casts are each made in one whole piece, while the mosaics are just that, a collection of fragments. And this is a serious business, to build a world from fragments, when most of us are working in the opposite direction - watching the whole fall apart, wondering why our lives feel like a museum of accidents, a compilation of out-takes. But there's a balance here that's less straightforward than it looks. If you let the elements become an image - if you let them disappear into the whole - they'll negate themselves. If you don't, then there's nothing but the material itself, arbitrary and chaotic. So you do have to find an edge, a place to stand, that idea of who you are. Are these pictures coming together or breaking apart? Could it be possible to do both those things at once?

Now take a step back from the image, and another, and another, until you start to see the architecture. Because, although Karoubi's artworks are not architecture, they're involved with it to the point that you have to wonder what kind of architecture they're not. They definitely have something to do with walls, not only because they hang on walls, but because they have something to do with windows, and windows only exist where there are walls. At least some of Karoubi's artworks have the same shapes and the same dimensions as the windows in the gallery - but you can't look through them. They're like the window and the view through the window both at once. Maybe that makes them landscapes, of a kind? But what kind of landscapes could these things possibly be? Nothing you could see out of these gallery windows, for sure. Somewhere, at a guess, very far from here. Dried-up river beds, lizards climbing in the ruins. Nathalie du Pasquier, for those who know. A different set of colours, a different sun. Or otherwise something geological, an aerial view from two miles up, looking down on a river delta, a mountain range. But then again, here's a thought: they might even be the thing itself, part of the actual world at actual size, real life at 1:1 scale, the city's broken pavements studded with fossils and, beneath them, the beach.

Text by Will Bradley, Kunsthall Oslo

Thank you to Kulturrådet for exhibition support.