PROJECTS IN THE MAKING…
Armen Eloyan: Dark Waters Run Deep

Born in Armenia in 1966, Armen Eloyan studied at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam between 2003 and 2005 and now lives between Amsterdam and Zurich. However, Eloyan’s star only took flight last August after his successful debut solo show at Bob van Orsouw Gallery in Zurich. As is often the case in the Swiss contemporary art scene, a show in Zurich leads to one in London: this year, the Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art featured Eloyan in his first UK solo show.

Eloyan’s expressive sense of drama, informed by his personal experiences and his youth in Soviet Armenia, plays out through scenarios that explore sexual drive, brutality and spiritual desolation. In both large-scale representational paintings and smaller portraits, Eloyan employs brash brush strokes, a dark palette and eerie settings. However, these brooding aspects are combined, quite literally, with a comical edge. Where early 20th-century avant-garde Russian artists drew on the lives of rural and urban workers for their subject matter, Eloyan chooses to work with figures from the popular culture of cinema, music or even pornography—but represents them as a cast of cartoon characters. Drawing from Americana, his use of lumberjacks, for example, with their bulbous cartoon noses and broad baseball caps, evokes a contemporary form of peasant life.

In Disaster (2006), a massive three-panel painting, Eloyan sets the scene for what appears to be the aftermath of a bloody barbeque: under a darkening sky, a scowling Mickey Mouse turns his back on a white rabbit figure that lays motionless with an arrow plunged into his gut. Untitled #10 (2006) imagines three menacing sausage figures in shiny black boots glaring ominously at a kitchen knife. Rex (2006) takes viewers inside an odd interior scene dominated by a pair of male legs chained to the end of a bed. In the background, a small bug-eyed woman wearing a paper crown labeled “Rex” lewdly displays her pale body.

Eloyan’s protagonists also figure in classical portrait style: in Fantasy Figure (2006), a blue-complexioned man wearing a florid necktie and top hat ensemble appears with an expression of surprise. Nightsmoker (2006) presents the outlined features of a dolled-up blonde in pink blouse and ruffled collar, framed against a black backdrop, as she clenches a cigarette between her teeth with an evil smile. The result is comic but also grippingly cruel and tragic.

While Eloyan’s paintings are filled with raw energy and thick messy paint strokes, the artist has left little to chance: his compositions, use of light and darkness and attention to perspective all boast of traditional painterly technique. Most of his works require several viewings to fully appreciate their layers of detail and structure. And while Eloyan takes a break from shows to concentrate on new work, the rest of the art world has an opportunity to catch up with this prolific, promising artist.

MARLYNE SAHAKIAN