Craig Kalpakjian’s work unsettles the infrastructures that surreptitiously organize our experience and scaffold our perception. He incisively renders the violent banality of contemporary life visible—forging a diagonal from the cop’s nightstick to linear perspective. His tactics are never wholly transparent but develop through a carefully elaborated language of abstraction that makes use of trusses, plants, robots, and surveillance equipment. For the past thirty years, he has multiplied the definitions of abstraction to encompass an array of alienating realms: bridging the antiseptic emptiness of virtual environments with the flattened geometries of modernism in a crossbreed of J.G. Ballard and Josef Albers. Making some of the earliest artworks to critically take on digital modeling by blurring the line between actualization and simulation, Kalpakjian’s models and devices always have real effects.

Kalpakjian’s new work shifts his focus to the compositional convention of the horizon line in warped scapes that dismantle any simple delineation of land, sea, sky, and ground. As in his earlier work with queue barriers or spotlights, the “exterior” devices that guide perception are folded into the work. The horizon’s exterior (the horizon of the horizon) is the framing mechanisms that lock the image in place, at eye-level, for the viewer. Kalpakjian skews and cants the frame to disrupt the usual depth cues and unground dimensional stability. These unstable abstractions elicit the wavering of parallax dimensions described in Edwin Abbott’s 1884 fantasy novel Flatland, where three-dimensional objects are flattened onto two-dimensional planes, and to speak of ulterior dimensions is a criminal act.

Kalpakjian’s “renderings” of virtual space are captured in off-center perspectives, yet a semblance of picturesque serenity eerily remains. The final images, machine painted in UV-pigment on dibond with pencil drawn beneath, look naturalistic at first glance but on closer inspection, the oceans appear to be dark hard-edged planes, and the skies seem to be flat luminous gradients. The frames resemble those of hermetically sealed windows: looking onto a world that is not quite exterior. This chilling viewpoint encapsulates the closed-open circuitry of Kalpakjian’s work, which pushes systems beyond their limit till they degenerate into chaotic feedback loops, infinite regress, or slow death.

For a body of work conspicuously emptied of figures, it’s important to realize the way Kalpakjian uncannily recapitulates the open-closed boundaries of the body without lapsing into the oceanic sublime of redemptive dissolution. For Freud, the oceanic experience was the confusion of a memory trace of porousness with a fantasy of protection. What of a plastic ocean that precedes and exceeds our desires for meaning, union, and vitality?

Kalpakjian’s word-scapes are similarly composed but stripped of luminescence and faintly drawn, appearing almost as photographic negatives or muted impressions of the original printed texts. Each work includes two handwritten passages in shapes that advance and recede into an abyss of starkly printed ink. Encrusted messages from Josef Albers, Alfred Döblin, Aldous Huxley, Franz Kafka, Philip Larkin, Elissa Marder, Marcel Proust, Ad Reinhardt, and Adalbert Stifter reflect Kalpakjian’s long-standing interest in the political consequences of modernism. An excerpt from The Trial is inscribed in colored pencil across an oceanic plane while a cloud-shaped text floating above describes the ego as a political organization (a quotation from Marder). The danger of the top-down modeling of society is apparent from the Huxley quote, which warns against a “dictatorship without tears,” produced through a pharmacology of enjoyment, inverting the more commonly imagined Orwellian disciplinary dystopia. Perhaps the algorithm is the ultimate incarnation of tear-free control which continuously resets the horizon as we blink.

The psychic machinery of Kalpakjian’s work is illuminated by such textual passages, which suggest that the ego acts as a horizon line dividing the unconscious real from conscious reality by administering and enabling the retention of letters and traces. His small heaps of letters forge a kind of “debris field” (to quote Leslie Winer) of symbolic inscriptions. The letters are mapped onto a tight linear grid, itself derived from a virtual diagram. There’s an irresolvable push-pull between the surface of the letter and the depth of the image in a paradoxically precise amorphousness: legible but scarcely readable.

Kalpakjian’s framings often produce a dialectical tension between blocking and permitting flows of energy, whether through bulletproof glass or queue barriers. Are these bulletproof sunsets? This tension adamantly refuses both the permeable splendor of vitalism and the opaque obscurity of the avant-garde. Instead, Kalpakjian invents new frames and devices that display an elastic potential without ever disguising his main vehicle of seduction: an entropic force that pulls the spectator through a vanishing point.

-Felix Bernstein

Craig Kalpakjian at Oreilles Internaxionales

The horizon line cuts a perplexing figure. It is at once a visual anchor—a reference point for nautical navigators or perspectival painters—and an abstraction, its distance indeterminate and its apparent flatness obscuring the curvature of the earth. Real and arbitrary, its ultimate effect depends on the viewer’s expectations and conditions of perception. In this sense, the horizon is something of a synecdoche for the work of American artist Craig Kalpakjian, who, for the past thirty years, has pressured those very effects and conditions through prescient, rigorous engagements with both physical and digital media, and techniques of both control and resistance.

Kalkpakjian’s first exhibition at Oreilles Internaxionales features four artworks that trade in aspects of the horizon’s logic. One of them, an untitled work in UV pigment on dibond, even appears to model a horizon traversing the lower third of an irregular quadrilateral. Beneath the line sits a solid, dark blue plane; above it, a lighter expanse, a subtle flare emanating from below. If Untitled (Natural Beauty #0007) evokes a seascape, it likewise insists upon the horizon’s abstractness—its incommensurability with real-world referents. Indeed, any hint of naturalism, as in much of Kalpakjian’s work dating to the 1990s, derives from computer processes; any perceived space, no matter how immersive, exists only as an image on the surface of its substrate, which, in this case—an odd shape, hung at an odd angle—further heightens the horizon’s shiftiness. Parallel to the floor but skewed with respect to its surroundings, Kalpakjian’s line questions its nominal pretense, i.e., its horizontality.

Adept at digital modeling, Kalpakjian keeps the techniques and discourses of painting in play. Destabilizing the categories of horizontal and vertical, flatness and depth, his pseudo-horizon pushes Untitled away from Renaissance scenes and toward the modernism of artists like Josef Albers (whose work Kalpakjian explored in his “L7” series of the 2010s) and Piet Mondrian. For Mondrian, horizontal and vertical lines locked together to create a sort of pulse; aimed at plastic and perceptual equilibrium, his matrices nevertheless induced disorientation, too. Two works dilate these pictorial maneuvers, pondering their relevance to contemporary visual regimes and practices. A drawing, Untitled (Linear Wave), displays a deformed mathematical grid, its complexity indexed by its handmade imprecision; a second work in UV pigment, Untitled (Natural Beauty #0003), occupies a traditional square format yet offers a pale, amorphous form, something like a cloud—the sign which, for Hubert Damisch, marks “the limit of representation, of what is representable.” Since the Renaissance, pictures have served to fix power in the form of mapping or registration; as this conjuncture becomes ever-more evident, Kalpakjian identifies alternatives—instances where strategic images meet their limits, break down, fail to lock subjects into place.

Color Management (RGB), a wall sculpture composed of three automated spotlights and a square truss frame, binds Kalpakjian’s critique of registration to the regulating technologies that enable it. Here, too, function turns to disfunction: the middle light dangles precariously from its “safety cable,” its quasi-organic movements untethered from its programming. The resulting chance color combinations thus materialize as momentary abstractions, less redolent of Albers than his Bauhaus colleague László Moholy-Nagy. While Kalpakjian’s technical détournement seems to liberate the device, the square format still contains the “free” movement, pointing viewers toward the ambient boundaries that persist in what Gilles Deleuze termed “societies of control.” One of this concept’s key interpreters, Kalpakjian enacts perceptual provocations to alert viewers of their societal place. And, as they move through the gallery, viewers of his exhibition find themselves duly contained, their image flattened and mediated by the windowpane for curious passersby—a coincidence that befits Kalpakjian’s characteristic balance of trenchant critique and dark humor.

—Joe Bucciero

The foundational gesture of systems theory is to distinguish an inside (the system) from an outside (the environment).

‘Gentlemen’ he would say, ‘collect your thoughts and enter into yourselves. We are not at all concerned now with anything external, but only with ourselves.’ And, just as he requested, his listeners really seemed to be concentrating upon themselves. Some of them shifted their position and sat up straight, while others slumped with downcast eyes. But it was obvious that they were all waiting with great suspense for what was supposed to come next. Then he would continue: ‘Gentlemen, think about the wall.’ And as I saw, they really did think about the wall, and everyone seemed able to do so with success. ‘Have you thought about the wall?’ he would ask. ‘Now, gentlemen, think about whoever it was that thought about the wall.’ The obvious confusion and embarrassment provoked by this request was extraordinary. In fact, many of the listeners seemed quite unable to discover anywhere whoever it was that had thought about the wall.

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