Asheville Citizen-Times, NC
Jan 9 2005

Leo Krikorian’s `Implied Space’ challenges viewers’ concepts

photo: Special to the Citizen-Times
Krikorian’s “580 EV,” an acrylic on canvas 2000

The exhibit
What: “IMPLIED SPACE,” a retrospective exhibition of paintings,
prints and photographs by Leo Krikorian
Where: Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center, 56 Broadway
When: Ongoing through April 30
Particulars: The museum is in downtown Asheville and is open noon to
5 pm Wednesday-Sunday
For more information: Call 350-8484

By Robert Godfrey
Jan. 7, 2005 6:03 p.m.

Leo Krikorian came from a small Armenian farming community in Fresno,
Calif., to the Black Mountain College, near Asheville, in 1947. He
studied with Josef Albers, who he thought was a poor teacher, and
with Ilya Bolotowsky, who became a lifelong friend. His early major
painting influence, however, was Piet Mondrian, with whom he did not
study.

The current survey of Krikorian’s work at the Black Mountain College
Museum + Art Center covers the years 1947 to 2003. This
mini-retrospective demonstrates Krikorian’s growing and continued
interest in hard-edged geometric abstraction after he left BMC as
well as his intermittent interest in photography – he studied with
Ansel Adams at the Art Center School in Los Angeles.

The four earliest paintings in this exhibition are from his student
days at BMC in 1947 and 1948. They do show Krikorian’s fascination
with Mondrian’s “Plus and Minus” and “Broadway Boogie Woogie” series,
which were just being introduced in New York at about this time.

But Krikorian soon left the Mondrian construct and worked from a
color matrix that was more or less based on the theories of Johannes
Itten. Krikorian explored the visual effect color had on changing
backgrounds and environments. Albers’ seminal work, “Homage to the
Square,” also seems to have been affected by Itten’s theories.

Krikorian’s most important pieces in the BMCM+AC show are “569 EV”
from 1999, “580 EV” and “581 EV,” both from 2000, and “627 EV” from
2003. All of these paintings are acrylic on canvas. These works are
saturated with charged and juiced- up color that Krikorian
encapsulates through shape and background, forcing the viewer’s eye
in and out of the picture plane with reversals of positive and
negative positions. Everything becomes wrong, disruptive and almost
passively assertive. The paradox of the frontal plane becoming
spatially ambiguous happens: Gravity is misplaced and elusive. There
are boundless optical illusions on one hand and intentional color
manipulations on the other. The artist seems to be jerking us around.

Krikorian, like other geometric color-charged abstractionists, plays
with the idea of tension interrupting harmony and chaos provoking the
cosmos. Just when you think things are settling down, visual hell
breaks out. Shapes begin to soar and float. With Krikorian’s
paintings, there is never really a quiet moment. This is analogous to
the way improvisational jazz works.

If kindred spirits exist in Krikorian’s universe they may be Elsworth
Kelly and the Midwest-based painter Larry Zox. And perhaps a little
bit of Bridget Riley. All of these artists reach beyond pattern to a
complex compositional construction that balances shapes while
interrupting the space and where a particular color behaves according
to the color next to it or underneath it. Line is also an integral
element that both bounds a shape or points it in another direction.

In all of these artists there seems to be a conscious need to
stimulate visual tactileness through high-intensity color that
vibrates in relationship to a neighboring pigment. But unlike Mark
Rothko and, at times, Barnett Newman, Krikorian – and his cohorts –
never quite reach that state of sensual tactility, of indulging the
sublime.

So where does Krikorian fit within the scheme of modernism? I’m not
quite sure. There is a large body of work that indicates his
persistence and necessity to produce a type of work that comfortably
adds to the sequence of hard- edge abstraction (see Larry Zox),
optical painting (see Richard Anuszkiewicz) and even neo-geo (see
Peter Halley). But a full study of his work and the influence he had
on other artists has yet to be undertaken. Now in his 80s, Krikorian
has created more than 600 major works of which he is now, according
to a recent interview in a San Francisco paper, giving away. A
cafeteria/auditorium at the D.H. White Elementary School in Rio
Vista, Calif., houses a significant collection of his work. Some
important works have been donated to restaurants. When Krikorian had
his first solo show in Asheville, at Broadway Arts in 1990, it went
unnoticed.

I think Krikorian has been an important player in the art world since
the 1950s. He will probably for the moment, however, be most
remembered for “The Place,” a bar he operated in the 1950s in San
Francisco that became the hangout of jazz musicians, artists and the
beat writers and poets. In fact, this writer heard, as a high school
student in New Jersey in the late 1950s, a concert by Dave Brubeck
who brought the house down with “Leo’s Place, ” a piece he had
recently created in honor of Krikorian’s bar.

Fortunately all the works in the BMCM+AC retrospective will remain in
Asheville as part of the museum’s permanent collection. They were
donated by the artist.

Robert Godfrey previously served as head of the Western Carolina
University art department. He can be reached at
rgodfrey@buncombe.main.nc.us.