In the current situations finding protection and homecoming in city habitats, rural houses or other shelter, we can find analogies in the ambiance of cave: archetypical qualities, which are still fundamental within our societal coexistence, especially when ‘borders’ are pushed towards us by outer forces. Sense of our human identity and security are upon enormous pressure, and we are looking deep into our hearts, while looking for the place of the origin and rebirth: the caves of insights, places of solitude and newly re-fleshing.
Meet the blessing of mortality by taking the invitation from earth to enter a cave. To be inside and to feel the material weight of matter by being a human. Then, within the matter, embodying the receptive state, one might incorporate insight and sense the true transmission in the landscapes of life. Sometimes just a particular insight is given through cracks and we emerge from our status quo. Causing effortless embodiment and allowing to become the being in coexistence with mortality.
Cave Insights | Red & Cave Insights | Red
2019-2021 260 x 200 cm Courtesy of the artist
Crimson | Photo work: Ute Langkafel
The series Cave Insights contains a Tryptichon of three of the large-scale paintings and the single work Crimson. They are suggested to be drifted inside spaces of our life-time. Art, as a tool for encounter and as media towards attacking and limiting forces, is essential for this work series. Nourished from Vardanyan's cave insights, canvas transforms into skin, borders can be sensed as a fragile threshold and as a breathing interface, where exchange takes place, even through tiny cracks. The phenomena of time/space itself carries, as our bodies do, the qualities of skin: they inhale and exhale through cracks. Information from outside goes within, and what is found inside turns out. Overload, lack and exaggerated flash are being released and rebalanced.
The fabric in these series is being encountered by the artist from both sides, the front and the back, the inside and the outside. By going deeply within, the border occurs to be an interface to the next state: experiencing skin, body and home as space equivalents through
‘Cave Insights’.
Hrachya Vardanyan, Elisabeth Handl 2021
Cave Insights | Black
Photo: Gurgen Ginosyan