The installation presents the carpet as a messenger within cultural and individual experiences. The installation of two large scale paintings permeates a resonance of immaterial memories. Each serves as a topographical map of spheres, with cracks revealing insights and allowing the flow and exchange of information.
crack{s} untethers the individual from traditional carpet aesthetics. Hrachya Vardanyan's carpets become a common ground to navigate within rich and diverse landscapes. Landscapes free of imprisoning dogmatism or ideology. The artist engages with the carpet but without its usual references - symbols, pattern, narratives - that could provide clues for identification. Instead, Vardanyan's paintings refer to the "carpet" metaphorical as markers of time and space in which the transcendental may blossom from within and begin to communicate.
Cracks are a signature of almost all of Vardanyan's most recent paintings. The patches of color on the uneven textures of the artist's work are riddled with these tiny cracks on faceted solid ground. The process of adding and removing layers of pigment on the canvas can be seen as an act of detachment from the known and confrontation with knowledge as a morphing membrane. Because the surface, the former screen, is becoming more and more permeable. The resulting work, as an interpersonal counterpart, is intensively and repeatedly impregnated, even transfused by the artist. Vardanyan often meanders across all sides of the fabric, leaving his devotion to the immediate interaction with the fabric.
photos: Milen Gevorgyan
Vardanyan himself refers to the cracks in the texture of his work as "insights of true knowledge." The general theme of his work could be interpreted as the relevance of hesitation, the inevitable dithering before the liminal articulation. His abstract paintings call to mind vanished tales from sites, petroglyphs found in high altitude mountain areas or winds touching face of Lake Sevan.
Black | Series: Cave Insights | 2016-2020 | 260 x 200 cm | Double-Sided | Mixed media on canvas.
Background Radiation Of Rugs #8 | Series: Nodes Of Orientation | 186 x 93 cm | Mixed media on canvas | Handcrafted Frame
Vardanyan is a seeker whose passion breaks through, relates to and honors ancient mythologies and wisdom while revealing the deeper meaning each and every form holds. It is in the artist's probing of matter that one finds the resulting traces of his path. He conjures personal and impersonal memories of his earthly influences, obscuring scenes, hazy and vague unless challenged by interpersonal encounters.
Works and projects of Hrachya Vardanyan evoke an inner landscape where instinct, matter and the unknown coalesce with political, cultural and transpersonal applications. His paintings possess a suggestiveness, at once organic and alive in texture, yet transparent by nature of their ethereal presence. The Armenian artist participated in several international residencies and exhibitions including those in China, U.S.A. and in multiple European countries.
text co-authors: Elisabeth Handl, Gagik Arshák, Avetik Vardanyan
conceptual curation: Elisabeth Handl
EXHIBITIONS
Personal Structures | European Cultural Center Italy,
Palazzo Mora, Venice, Italy
23.4.2022 - 27.11.2022
The biennial contemporary art exhibition Personal Structures, envisioned and curated by the team of European Cultural Center Italy, presents „crack{s}“ at Palazzo Mora from April 23rd to November 27th, 2022 in parallel to Venice Art Biennale 2022.
„This year, the exhibition will revolve around the idea of reflections, understood as both the image created from a mirrored surface as well as a thought, idea, or opinion formed from meditation. At Personal Structures, the theme of reflections will embody the dual meaning of, on the one hand, a visible episode perceived by the eyes; and, on the other, a mental deed stemming from the action of thinking and pondering with the mind. As envisioned by the ECC curatorial team, the act of reflecting carries the potential to foresee possibilities and the responsibility of imagining a better future.“ Curatorial Statement, ECC Italy
PARTNERS
This project is realized with the sponsoring, the support and cooperation of ...