“Water is the element of reverie. It is the fresh water of the imagination.” (Gaston Bachelard)

Shapes of water #5

Shapes of Water explores the liminal space between presence and absence, between what is seen and what is felt. Conceived as Karim Carella’s new photographic series for 2026, the project was partially unveiled at the end of 2025 through a preview presentation of three works, offering an early glimpse into its emotional and visual core.

Rooted in a long-standing minimalist approach to landscape photography, this series marks a further step in the artist’s ongoing dialogue with abstraction, where the natural world is progressively reduced to its most essential visual and emotional components.

Shapes of water #2

Water becomes both subject and language: a mutable surface through which form dissolves, time slows, and perception softens.

The images appear almost stripped of narrative, hovering at the edge of recognizability. This deliberate reduction is not an aesthetic exercise alone, but a philosophical one — an attempt to capture “nothing that represents everything.” Here, “nothing” is the visual minimum, while “everything” is the emotional totality the viewer is invited to inhabit.

Shapes of water #21

The series is structured around a subtle chromatic and tonal duality. Three darker works, dense and shadowed — the same images first presented in preview at the end of 2025 — might initially be read as expressions of inner turmoil, born from a period of deep emotional struggle. Yet they do not stand in opposition to the lighter images. Instead, they coexist with them, revealing that darkness is not confined to obscurity, nor is light synonymous with peace.

Shapes of water #11

The soft, luminous photographs — seemingly calm, fluid, and meditative — conceal an underlying tension. Beneath their apparent serenity lies a quiet yearning for disappearance, a desire to dissolve gently into the vastness they depict. In this sense, light does not resolve pain; it transforms it into silence.

Here, one senses a need to fade without noise, to surrender quietly to ambiguity, and to let the self dissolve within these minimal forms — suspended between loss and calm, visibility and vanishing. In this suspended space, the artist’s work becomes less a depiction of landscape and more a mirror of an inner state, where emotional weight is carried by the smallest possible gesture.
Adrian K. Garet

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The complete “Shapes of Water” collection will soon be available on this website in the Portfolios section.
The works will soon be available on these art marketplaces: Artfinder, Saatchi Art, Tricera.
For those interested in reserving a piece, please contact the artist directly at info@karimcarella.com to inquire about the collection.