KAMROOZ ARAM

Negotiations

February 18 - March 26, 2011
Perry Rubenstein Gallery, New York, NY

Excerpt from press release:

The flag paintings reflect Aram’s ongoing interest in nationalist, religious and artistic ideologies. Using patterns derived from traditional Persian art forms, such as carpets, Aram works through a process of building, destroying and rebuilding these so-called “ornamental” forms on the canvas. While flags have long been present throughout Aram’s work as generalized forms in a lexicon of iconography, in this new series the paintings themselves take on the characteristics of a flag. Aram has introduced geometric forms that at once reference flag design as well as geometric abstraction, a reference to Modernist ideology and its historical conflict with ornamentation. As a result of this process, the paintings question the notion of pattern as inherently decorative, as geometry and ornamentation struggle for domination of the final image.

In the series of collages, 7,000 Years, the artist dissects and reconstructs pages from mid-century exhibition catalogues of Iranian art objects. When using the nostalgic phrase “7,000 years of history,” many Iranians evoke what they see as their magnificent cultural past; for some, it is a way of coming to terms with what they perceive to be a dismal present, while for others it is a way of emphasizing the nation’s glory and independence from colonial powers. Similarly, Aram views what he sees as a fixation on Modernism in Western culture generally and in contemporary art specifically, as a form of cultural nostalgia in which a glorious past is idealized and revered. The compositions in this series often evoke the Modernist reverence for geometry, bringing into question the complicated relationship between Modernism and non-Western art.

Fana’ is the Arabic and Persian term for erasure or annihilation and is used in mystical thought to connote self-negation. In the series of paintings by this name, the idealized central form (often seen in the artist’s previous work) is a result of wiping away and sanding down the surface of the painting. The process of destroying the center of the painting results in the illusion of a central form of light.