SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Casemore Gallery is presenting pasajes, a solo presentation of paintings, photographs, and drawings by Luz Carabaño, a Los Angeles–based Venezuelan artist. The exhibition interweaves several elements of Luz’s practice, revealing the various stages that coalesce into her signature small-scale oil paintings with porcelain-like finishes. Distinct shapes and muted colors dance off the curves of each irregularly shaped canvas while light and shadow twist along found grids that Luz captures on color film and digital snaps of her everyday comings and goings. Her drawings are like scattered leaves falling down the wall’s surface, revealing the artist’s unfiltered thought process in fleeting personal moments. Displaying all three mediums together for the first time in this inaugural solo exhibition with Casemore Gallery, Luz Carabaño offers the viewer a unique, intimate experience of her practice.

Luz’s paintings often begin with a shuffling of her deck of printed photographs she’s taken of shapes, shadows, and textures recorded in the streets of her current hometown of Los Angeles and throughout her travels abroad. When she lands on composition that resonates with her, she translates, magnifies, and abstracts those elements often beyond comprehensibility onto linen canvas stretched over a distinctive wooden panel. No two canvases are ever alike. In pasajes, Carabaño delicately layers muted greens, yellows, and blues. Sometimes she attaches the colors to loose grids like in ventanas azules and nudo and other times letting the animated shapes fold, melt, and float on and over one another in pieces like stream and secuencía de señales. Luz applies and sands many layers of gesso in preparation, later laying evenly painted planes on top, giving each piece a polished finish. Appearing to float off the wall, these petite works possess the exquisite ability of catching one's eye from the opposite side of the room.

Although photography has always served as a crucial tool in Carabaño’s practice, she unveiled images alongside her painting for the first time in Casemore Gallery’s summer group exhibition, A Petal’s Edge, last year. This specific collection of images were taken in the last year and ties into the themes of the paintings presented, but also serve as standalone moments. Luz captures the unexpected beauty of a solidary lemon or fallen translucent pink petals caught between the scaffolding of branches and metal bars. Her images are nearly tucked inside curved cream and grey frames mimicking the soft edges of her paintings and drawings.

An assemblage of drawings, Luz’s collection of works on paper echo the artist’s immediate interactions with the outside world. She describes them as “naked, exposed, and direct” with color pencil markings rubbing against the fibers of the handmade paper. These casual encounters at times point at the ground emphasizing the importance of also spending time with the offerings of the ground beneath us. Like fossilized puzzle pieces, when viewed together these paintings, photographs, and drawings create a door or pasaje through which distinctive moments of the artist’s life enter for the viewer to enjoy.

Luz Carabaño (b. 1995, Maracay, Venezuela) is a Los Angeles–based Venezuelan artist. She received a BFA in Studio Art from New York University in 2017 and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2022. Carabaño works primarily in small-scale oil paintings on shaped supports, ceramic objects, drawings on paper, and handmade books. Recent solo exhibitions include currents, Hoffman Donahue (New York, 2025); iluminaciones, Nina Johnson (Miami, 2024); antesis, Super Super Markt (Berlin, 2024); encuentros, Hannah Hoffman (Los Angeles, 2023); sombras, Lulu (Mexico City, 2023); rastros, Larder (Los Angeles, 2022); Unfoldings, april april (New York, 2022); and Ni Aquí, Ni Allá, Dimensions Variable (Miami, 2019). Carabaño was the 2021 recipient of the University of California, Los Angeles’s Helen Frankenthaler Award in Painting.