Light as Architecture

Structure, light and recovery in the white reliefs of Karina Yacoubian

Artist's essay · Karina Yacoubian · Limburg, Belgium · October 2026

English · Nederlands · Español

Abstract

This text sets out the central proposition of Karina Yacoubian's practice: that light and architecture form a single language, and that this language can be built from recovered matter. Trained in architecture and interior design, Yacoubian approaches every relief as a building. She constructs its structure from fragments of metal, plastic and cardboard, folded with rice paper, Amalfi paper, plaster and mineral compounds, and designs it for the light it will receive. White removes the history of each material and leaves volume, edge and hollow, the forms that light needs in order to speak.

This essay develops three claims. First, light is a building material: it is not added to the work but designed with it. Second, light and structure together communicate, narrate and interpret; light does not illuminate the relief, it tells it. Third, because light moves, the reading of the work changes with every hour. The text situates the practice at the meeting point of two traditions, the white monochrome relief and the architecture of light, and tests its claims against the works of the series Pure White (2021–ongoing) and Pure White Reinvention (2026).

Running through the whole text are a few constant concerns: light and structure, the white monochrome, recovered materials, and the time it takes to look at a work that changes with every hour.

1. Introduction

A white relief hangs on a wall. In the morning one of its folds casts a long, sharp shadow across the surface. At noon the same fold has nearly disappeared. Towards evening the whole surface turns warm, and volumes that seemed flat at midday return. Nothing in the object has changed. Everything in the work has.

This observation is the starting point of the present text. It suggests that the work is not complete in the object alone; it is completed by the light of the place that receives it. That idea is not new in the history of art, and it is central to the history of architecture. What is particular to Karina Yacoubian's practice is the way it joins the two: an artist trained in architecture who builds reliefs the way one builds a space, from materials that others have discarded, and who treats light not as illumination but as part of the structure.

The proposition can be stated in one sentence:

Trained in architecture, Karina Yacoubian approaches every relief as a building: she constructs its structure from recovered matter and designs it for light, so that light and architecture become a single language that reads differently at every hour.

The chapters that follow examine each part of that sentence: the method that comes from architectural training (chapter 2), the idea of light and architecture as one language (chapter 3), the role of recovered matter (chapter 4), the traditions in which the work takes its place (chapter 5), the works themselves (chapter 6), the question of time and the viewer (chapter 7), and the more recent series Pure White Reinvention (chapter 8).

2. Trained in architecture: a method

Karina Yacoubian studied interior design at ORT University in Montevideo and architecture at the University of Belgrano in Buenos Aires. As a painter she is self-taught. This combination matters, because it explains why her reliefs are not painted images with added texture, but constructions.

Her training shows in four habits of work.

Structure first. Each relief begins as a structure: a set of volumes, planes and hollows that must hold together physically before they mean anything visually. The question is the one an architect asks of a building: what carries what, where the load goes, how the parts meet.

Designing for light. An architect considers orientation, openings and shadow before a wall is built. Yacoubian treats each fold in the same way. The angle of a plane determines whether it will catch light or fall into shadow, and the depth of a hollow decides how dark it will become. The image of the work is designed in advance as a pattern of light and shade.

Scale and space. The reliefs measure between 100 and 120 centimetres and project around 15 centimetres from the wall. They are conceived in relation to the room: the height at which they hang, the distance of the viewer, the direction of the window. This makes them site-responsive even when they are not site-specific.

Knowledge of materials. Familiarity with how materials behave, resist and join allows the transformation of fragile or unlikely matter, such as packaging, metal offcuts and paper, into durable structures.

The result is a practice in which the vocabulary of architecture (structure, load, plane, opening, orientation) is more useful for describing the work than the vocabulary of painting. Yacoubian does not paint an image of light. She builds the conditions in which light can appear.

3. Light and architecture as a single language

In architecture, light is never added at the end. It is designed together with the walls, the openings and the materials, and it is through light that a space speaks: it reveals volume, sets a rhythm, signals where to go and where to stop. When light is treated as part of the structure, it takes on a value of its own. It no longer serves the building; it is one of its materials.

Yacoubian applies this understanding to the relief. Her works make three claims about light.

Light is a building material. The surface is built to receive it. A fold, a ridge or a hollow is placed where it will produce a specific shadow, and the image of the work exists only when light and structure meet.

Light communicates, narrates and interprets. In these reliefs light does not simply show what is there. It tells it. A ridge lit from the left reads as a horizon; the same ridge lit from above reads as a wound. The light chooses what the work says.

Structure and light are inseparable. Without light the structure is silent; without structure the light has nowhere to speak. Neither is the subject on its own. The subject is their encounter, which is why the work can be described as a single language rather than as an object under illumination.

This is what distinguishes the practice from painting about light. A painter can depict light. Yacoubian builds the conditions in which light performs the image, live, in the room where the work hangs.

4. Recovery: matter and transformation

The structures are built from recovered matter: fragments of metal, plastic and cardboard, the remains of objects that once had a purpose. They are folded together with rice paper, Amalfi paper, cotton and natural fibre papers, plaster and mineral compounds until their former use disappears and they become structure. The surface is then worked in acrylic, oil and spray paint, and brought to white.

Recovery is not a matter of economy or a decorative reference to sustainability. It has two precise functions in the work.

Transformation. Material that was packaging, offcut or waste becomes the load-bearing part of a structure designed for light. The work enacts, in its own making, a passage from what was discarded to what carries meaning.

A common language. Metal, plastic and paper reflect and absorb light in very different ways. Covered in white, they begin to speak one language. White removes the history of each fragment and leaves only form: volume, edge, hollow and the shadows they cast. What remains visible is not where the material came from, but what it has become.

In this sense, white is the hinge of the practice. It is the step that turns recovered matter into architecture for light.

5. Lineage: the white monochrome and the architecture of light

The work takes its place at the meeting point of two traditions.

The white monochrome relief. From 1957 Piero Manzoni's Achromes reduced the painting to a white surface of folds and stitched material, without image or colour. In the same years the ZERO group in Düsseldorf (Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Günther Uecker) and its Dutch counterpart Nul (Jan Schoonhoven, Henk Peeters, among others) made light and its vibration on white surfaces a central concern. Enrico Castellani's Superfici and Agostino Bonalumi's extroflexions pushed the canvas into relief so that light and shadow would carry the work. This tradition is strongly present in the collections of Belgium and the Netherlands, where Yacoubian lives and works.

The architecture of light. Le Corbusier defined architecture as "the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light". Louis Kahn designed buildings in which daylight is the principal material, and the sentence attributed to him, that the sun never knew how great it was until it struck the side of a building, has become a reference for architects who think with light. Luis Barragán and Tadao Ando built spaces where a wall exists to receive a particular light at a particular hour.

Position. Yacoubian shares the monochrome's attention to surface and light, but not its pursuit of purity. Her white is not a reduction; it is the ground on which recovered matter is transformed. From the architecture of light she takes the idea that light is designed, not received, and that a structure is judged by what light does with it. Her contribution is to bring the architect's way of thinking about light into the relief, and to build it from what others have discarded. The work can be read from either tradition, and it is richer for belonging fully to neither.

6. The works: readings of Pure White

Pure White (2021–ongoing) comprises fifteen reliefs to date, in formats of 100 × 100, 120 × 100 and 120 × 120 centimetres, all around 15 centimetres deep. The readings below follow the three claims of this essay.

Deconstructivism (2021). Three-dimensional triangles rise from left to right and break apart as they climb, until geometry turns into raw matter. The title borrows from the architectural movement that abandoned symmetry and harmony. Every facet catches the light differently, so light and shadow are not added to the work; they are part of its structure. It is the clearest early statement of the practice: an architectural idea, built in relief, completed by light.

Moon (2022). Four vertices project from the surface, one for each lunar phase. The work does not depict the phases; it produces them. As the light moves, each vertex in turn comes forward or recedes, so that the piece changes through the day like the moon it names. Time is not represented here. It is built in.

Milky Way, Bear and Fish (2023). A galaxy built from salvage. Fragments of metal and plastic, folded into cotton and natural fibre papers, form a white topography with no single centre. Two figures surface from it, the partial head of a bear and a fish that runs through the composition like a spine. It is the work in which recovery is most visible: discarded matter becomes a cosmos.

Earth, Bomb and Flower (2024). A trilogy in one relief: the earth, the bomb that could erase it, and a flower that suggests matter might begin again. Held entirely in white, the image lives in volume and in the shadows it casts, which shift with the strength and angle of the light.

Sun (2021) and Sun Don't Stop Shining (2025). In both works light is the subject as well as the medium. In Sun, broad sheets of paper fold diagonally and fan out like rays, each casting a long, sharp shadow. In Sun Don't Stop Shining, folds radiate from the centre and a faint face appears and fades into the light. The two works, four years apart, show the same idea maturing: from rays depicted in structure to a surface that seems lit from within.

Big Bang (2025). The central volume is built as an inverted diamond, and its upward pull gives the surface a sense of pressure about to be released. It is the most architectural of the recent works: a structure of load and tension, read entirely through its shadows.

Silence (2024) and Turning Point (2025). In a few works colour appears inside the white: a warm yellow in Silence, a deep blue breaking through in Turning Point. The name Pure White refers to a conceptual approach, white as the ground for light, rather than a strict chromatic rule. Where colour enters, it behaves like light held inside the structure.

7. Time and the viewer

If light is part of the work, and light moves, then the work changes. This is the logical consequence of the argument, and it has practical implications.

The work has no single correct image. A photograph shows one hour. The relief contains all of them. In the morning a fold casts a long, sharp shadow; at noon it nearly disappears; towards evening the surface warms and the volumes return. Each hour proposes another reading.

The viewer completes the reading. Seen from the side, the same relief reveals depths that disappear when seen from the front. Seen on another day, under cloud, it becomes quieter and more uniform. The work asks for a slower way of looking: to stand before it long enough to watch the light change its meaning.

Documentation must show time. For this reason the work is best documented not by a single frontal photograph but by a sequence: the same relief photographed at 9, 13 and 18 hours from a fixed position, or a time-lapse recording of a full day under natural light. These sequences are not illustrations of the argument; they are its evidence.

Display is part of the work. Raking or lateral natural light reveals the relief; flat frontal lighting erases it. When the works are exhibited, the choice of light is a curatorial decision that completes, or diminishes, what they say.

8. Pure White Reinvention

Pure White Reinvention (2026) consists of seven works, each 100 × 100 centimetres. Nature, colour and the human figure begin to emerge from the same white ground. The series follows a single female figure through withdrawal and renewal: from Introspection, the first work, where she folds in on herself; through Outlook and Wind, where she turns outward and becomes air; to Blindness and The Silence, where she closes herself off; Metamorphosis, where heavy matter turns into plumage; and Evolution, the most recent, where leaves, flowers and butterflies grow from her.

At first sight the figurative series seems to depart from the architecture of light. Read through this essay, it continues it. In Pure White, light narrates the structure; in Reinvention, what the light has been telling begins to take shape. The white ground remains the field in which form appears, and blue functions, as one work's description puts it, as atmospheric pressure, a psychological space rather than a physical one.

This reading is offered as a proposition rather than a conclusion. Its strength will depend on works that make the passage visible: reliefs in which the figure emerges from structure, rather than being painted on the white.

9. Conclusion

Karina Yacoubian's reliefs rest on three foundations that work as one. Her training in architecture provides the method: structure first, designed for light. Recovered matter provides the material: fragments that lose their former use and become structure. Light provides the meaning: it does not illuminate the work, it tells it, and it tells it differently at every hour.

The practice belongs to the tradition of the white monochrome relief, but it does not seek purity. It belongs to the architecture of light, but it is not a building. Its particular contribution is to bring the architect's way of designing light into the relief, and to build that architecture from what others discarded.

The consequence is a body of work without a single correct image. Each relief is completed by the light of the place that receives it and by the time a viewer is willing to give it. What remains to be done follows from this: to document the works across the hours, to exhibit them in light that reveals rather than flattens, and to extend the method to a larger scale, where the relief and the architecture that receives it can be designed together.

Critical reception

Between 2024 and 2026 the work was reviewed by four curators and gallerists through the Singulart Expert Feedback programme, and selected by around twenty curators for more than thirty thematic collections on the platform.

• Ainhoa Fernández, gallerist and curator, AF (2025): observes "a strong architectural sensibility in how shapes are constructed and layered".
• Véra Kempf, independent curator (2024): describes Pure White as "exceptionally successful" and of a quality "rare in contemporary art", and encourages a larger scale and a deeper relation between work, space and viewer.
• Anastasia Mitrogogou, independent curator (2024): calls Earth, Bomb and Flower "a masterpiece".
• Elisa Pritzker, director, Pritzker Studio & Gallery (2025, 2026): reads the two series as an evolution "from pure form to inner life".

Several curatorial collections in which the works were included name the concerns of this essay without reference to it: The Silence of White, The Expanded Object, Textured Surfaces, and Les lueurs qui prennent leur temps ("lights that take their time").

List of works

All works: acrylic, oil and mixed media on canvas. Dimensions in centimetres, height × width; depth of the Pure White reliefs approximately 15 cm.

Pure White (2021–ongoing)

Pure White Reinvention (2026)

References

• Le Corbusier. Vers une architecture. Paris: Crès, 1923. English edition: Towards a New Architecture.
• Piero Manzoni, Achromes, from 1957.
• ZERO (Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, Günther Uecker), Düsseldorf, from 1957; Nul (Jan Schoonhoven, Henk Peeters and others), the Netherlands, from 1961.
• Enrico Castellani, Superfici, from 1959; Agostino Bonalumi, extroflexions, from the late 1950s.
• Louis I. Kahn, Luis Barragán and Tadao Ando, architectural works on daylight as material.
• Singulart Expert Feedback reviews: Anastasia Mitrogogou (October 2024), Véra Kempf (September 2024), Ainhoa Fernández (April 2025), Elisa Pritzker (October 2025 and April 2026). Unpublished.