ARIS AZARMSA

White Rabbit

February 19th - March 13th 2022

Swivel Gallery is pleased to present “White Rabbit”, the first solo exhibition by Aris Azarmsa...featuring twelve of the artist’s new series of painstaking paintings that have been over a year in the making. Azarmsa’s works are a reflection of, and live in the canon of American post modern painting, they exist on survival, and grasp at extending and continuing the tradition of the medium of oil painting. At first glance, they cast a complex barrage of demanding imagery that nearly comes off abstract, their immediate attack of the senses nearly knocks us backwards; but as our eyes adjust slowly they come to life like musical notes spread across the canvas. Our mind receives the puzzle and begins to dissect it, the results of which seem never ending.

His works live somewhere in the in between, they are part figurative, part abstract, and part insanity. They are a homage to the act of painting, a homage to the labor, and us as the receiver have to relent to their undertaking. In the age of immediacy where we consume vapid amounts of information by the day, by the hour, and by the second Azarmsa’s works speak to and accept that dilemma, while simultaneously going against it. There is in the work an obvious connection to our daily lives where seclusion, indulgence, and the act of binging by our lonesome has become an act of continuity, a way of preserving our sanity. We feel this in our scrutiny of these creations, their lo-fi almost “outsider” quality feels akin to our current existence. De Kooning once said, “my interest in desperation lies only in that sometimes I find myself having become desperate”, for an artist that is clear enough, living in your own mini cosmos where one must fill a void, be that a blank canvas or a portion of themselves. This notion is evident in the Azarmsa’s characters unto whom he packs with waves of emotions, almost as if each one he is rendering is analogous to his own current personal dilemmas, and ours too.

The process, in which he breaks down the blank space of the canvas intuitively, stopping at intervals and loading square inch by square inch with it’s own eerie often merciless microcosms; where ghostly, anxiously etched expressions remind us of Giacometti, twisted malfunction like figures bring to mind Egon Schiele, live inside raunchy, Peter Doig like landscapes. But the movies, iconic as they are, a conscious choice as they are, are merely a reference for our American existence. One where shock is seldom, violence is an everyday sport, and a suppressed panic and fear has become embedded in our DNA. There is nothing shiny here, no precious object, there is no flash and bang, only a muddied, muddled blur that is the culmination of our last two years. This is where Azarmsa’s work hurdles it’s possibility of being a gimmick and lives in honesty, that of a Generation Z being searching for answers in a media laden world, looking for a god in between freeze frames, looking for answers inside a black box.