A hommage in four tableaus
At the beginning there was Meghri, “a dusty border town“ in the most southern point of the Republic of Armenia, in the Land of Ararat, where the river Arax unites the threshold region between today’s Armenian and Iranian borders. This is where historically the Silk Road passed and was carrying for more than trade. Today on the same route, Caravanserais remain as silent witnesses and keepers of that memory, transmitting oral history from Asia to Europe.
The symbol of silk in times of geo-engineered Climate Change and VELVETrevolutions
In Meghri, before the so called Velvet Revolution took life in Armenia, in March of 2018, the artists Ute Langkafel (Berlin, Germany) and Hrachya Vardanyan (Gyumri, Armenia) began visual research on landscapes and their background. They shared an intuition about not only the lands immediate presence, but also a curiosity about the landscape‘s macrochires hidden meanings.
Through their way of seeing they seem to sense the land’s positing its ability to transform with the changing world and also, very critically, to be resilient in maintaining its origins. The Artists‘ considered approach of seeing takes the form of an inner and outer world in flux, historical and cultural plateaus that intersect in time and space, between East and West.It is longing for the uniting TEXTures of VELVET and SILK beyond the local revolutions and “right now realities.“
Their artistic medium travelled alongside the changes happening in Armenia, the artists were casting volcanic metals to reveal inside the melted matter the imagery of landscapes' transformations and origins. While experiencing different artistic layers based on painting, photography and encaustic their new fundamental medium, the beeswax, crystallized itself. It is visualizing unseen potentials through fractal patterns. The beeswax is breaking the „Digital White“ and gives authentic sense to the morphology of the artworks.
Inside the crater
Under the title “Inside the Crater” Langkafel and Vardanyan inaugurated their “Hommage to Meghri“ in Galerie MAIFOTO in Berlin September 2018, revealing the color range of Crimson in-between glowing red, white and sulfur, green and yellow with an organic touch of the beeswax. The visual imagery in this series can be described as embracing no horizons, inside surfaces without points of orientation, moments before eruptions, before becoming the physical of the outside world.