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ARCHITECTURE, DISPATCHES ART, MUSIC, ARCHITECTURE, FILM, SHOPPING, NEWS AND THINGS TO MAKE AND DO… ART, MUSIC, ARCHITECTURE, FILM, SHOPPING, NEWS AND TH
MESS IT UP:
ARMEN ELOYAN
In Armen Eloyan’s vital, messy canvases,
aggressive figures, operating somewhere
between Beckettian absurdity and the
casual cruelty of Wacky Races, occupy
a world that is by turns brutal,
buffoonish and banal. Realised in gutsy,
gestural strokes, cartoon creatures,
couch potatoes or sadomasochists drip
off canvases animated by the grotesque
friction between comedy and violence.
Much like everyday life, then.
Compacting a sense of cultural free
fall, the artist, born in Armenia though
working in Amsterdam and Zurich, plays
fast and loose with art-historical
references, pop culture and political
propaganda.
Fantasy Figure (2006), for example,
is composed like a traditional portrait
painting, with the head and bust of a
man set against a woody landscape
background. However, his skin and hair
have been painted over in a sooty black,
beneath which an Aryan colour scheme RECONSTRUCTION: , 2007, graphite and watercolour on paper, 31 x 16 cm.
pokes through. His eyes roll in YURI MASNYJ
different directions, his teeth are
pointed and savage, and everything is The American artist Yuri
realised in a seething, crazed impasto Masnyj’s drawing and sculpture
melding Van Gogh with something closer swoop through history, Your Old House Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York
to George Condo’s bestial energy. scavenging the cultural invites a detached, exegetical
Following his recent solo shows in dustheap for undigested scraps air; filtered through
Zurich and Paris, Eloyan is staging his of art, architecture and Masnyj’s stable of stylistic
first UK exhibition at Parasol Unit design. His 2004 exhibition and conceptual tics, however,
in London this month. Titled Two feet in of drawings at London’s Sutton it pinpricks the sinuous
one shoe, it promises an uncomfortable Lane saw Suprematism get its histories of Western culture
vision of life in which our repressed comeuppance. The black square with small but potent meanings.
anxieties come splurting out of – considered by Malevich as a
unaccommodating boxes. Skye Sherwin pinnacle of his non-objective For his exhibition this month
lexicon – became a cumbersome ARMEN ELOYAN: TWO FEET IN ONE at Metro Pictures in New York,
anti-hero in Masnyj’s world SHOE, 1 JUNE – 20 JULY, PARASOL the artist proposes further
of swift economy. Perennially UNIT, LONDON, WWW.PARASOL-UNIT.ORG cultural replay by tracing the
trapped on a linear slope and legacies of the modernist
oblivious to the surrounding, schools to their contemporary
gestural frenzies, it served end-points, thus re-dressing
less as a historical excerpt his freewheeling fragments as
than a warning to those eager domestic decor. Masnyj’s new
to make art play handmaiden drawings will continue in the
to ideology. vein of recent pieces like Big
Books, The Study and Your Old
Masnyj’s sculptures, such as House (all 2007), whose
The Fine Line (2006), his household interiors – wrought
contribution to the last with sparse Soviet palettes of
Whitney Biennial, come across black graphite and pink and
as rough-and-ready bricolages purple watercolour – compact
of construction materials and Constructivism’s socio-
debris; in actuality, they are aesthetic agenda into
hand-cast or replicated by the , 2006, oil on canvas, 120 x 100 cm. minimalist wood panelling,
artist in plaster, wax and striated ceiling lamps, housing
painted wood. Caught within block-esque bookshelves and
clusters of wooden beams or other staples of tidy design.
resting delicately on single Tyler Coburn
sticks are framed drawings
of imagery Masnyj copies YURI MASNYJ, 21 JUNE –
from Géricault, Roni Horn 31 JULY, METRO PICTURES,
and others. Yet they amount NEW YORK, WWW.
to more than mere citations. METROPICTURESGALLERY.COM
Appropriation so easily Wishes and Wishes (Rex) (#75) Private Collection, Switzerland
ARTREVIEW three.linfour.lin
p033-034 Dispatches AR Jun07.ind34 34 5/5/07 22:19:54
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