Karma presents Belgian painter Carole Vanderlinden’s debut exhibition in New York, open from November 1 to December 21, 2024, at 188 East 2nd Street. 

Carole Vanderlinden’s painting practice is expansive, encompassing what she has called “a mix of genres” to achieve “a coming together of things that shouldn’t mix.” For thirty years, she has worked across collage, drawing, and oils, exploring the syntax of painting through association, intuition, and the act of making itself, as evinced by the oils on view here, made over the course of the last decade. Her titles, which span and sometimes combine numerous languages, point to her imbrication in both semantic and art historical multitudes. 

With innumerable motifs and methods on the table, the fundamental condition of painting—choice—comes to the fore. Deciding on subject and form, she is guided by her mind as much as her hand. As she explains: “The hand is an extension of our thoughts, like an ‘instrument’ physically connected to the painting.” Vanderlinden’s works do not generate stable meanings, legibility, or narrative; rather, they remain autonomous, commenting primarily on the act of putting brush to canvas. Each painting represents, for the artist, a singular, playful way of grappling with the world around her. Rather than objective statements, they are subjective expressions, generated from memories, images, and snatches of detail, unafraid of humor and never wedded to a single approach.

Although Purple house (2023), L’escalier bleu (2023), and Un tour en ville (2023) each depict domestic architectures, what unites them more than the subject matter is Vanderlinden’s embrace of a freedom in painting that allows for experimentation and exploration above all. Melanie Deboutte has written that, in Vanderlinden’s practice, “each element, be it a brushstroke or accidental mark, relates to the rest in complete autonomy and equality,” and in Nature morte (2019), this horizontal relationality manifests metaphorically in her depiction of a tabletop strewn with ambiguous forms, all coexisting on the same plane. Thinking and working slowly, she nondogmatically investigates ways of representing the world in all of its variety. 

 In Paysage tropical (2014), dark, blueish-green paint drips from a verdant array of plant life outlined in the same color, serendipity existing alongside intention—evidence of the artist’s longstanding responsiveness to both chance and materiality. The passage of time is visible on the surface of this painting, gravity slowed down and arrested. The impasto brushwork in Papillon verde (2024) contrasts with the thick black outline delineating a simplified, smiling face topped with a yellow, mustache-shaped toupé. Capharnaüm (2024), its title a French word indicating a disorderly accumulation of objects, knits monstrous visages into a tapestry of colorful swatches. Couple aguerri (2024), a figurative but not naturalistic work built from overlapping and interlocking shapes, imbues the exaggerated geometry of the costumed dancers in Bauhaus choreographer Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet (1922) with a faux-naïve lightheartedness. For Vanderlinden, who ardently believes in the power of her medium, “Painting does not deceive,” but rather, “has the gentle power to unite.”