Life as a series of bizarre theatrical sets
ByJackie Wullschlager
FT
July 13 2007 18:47
Every clown wants to play Hamlet; only rarely does Hamlet act the
clown. But in `Two Feet in One Shoe’, his installation of furiously
gestural, slithery, smeared, chaotic canvases in dark or garish
colours, Armen Eloyan is such an actor-painter. Depicting life as a
series of bizarre theatrical sets, fantasy characters, masked players,
he creates a tragicomic universe where the performance of painting is
the most absurdist drama of all.
A figure is trapped in a giant book; another stands on top of a closed
volume, refusing access to knowledge. A skeletal creature in
18th-century dress stalks a night-time park, the sky scrawled with the
words `Hold My Bones Together’. Chained decapitated geese drip crimson
beaks; anthropomorphic sausages warily eye a kitchen knife; a landscape
of purple pineapples is hatched with prison bars.
Menace and beauty, despair and vitality: Eloyan was born in Armenia in
1966 and the traditions he is parodying are east European
expressionism, folklore, Kafkaesque narrative, all crossed with a
post-Disney cartoon vocabulary, the splashy pessimism of Los Angeles
artists such as Paul McCarthy, and, mostly, memories of Soviet
oppression and mental constraint. Spanker and victim in `Bend Over’;
the puffed-up, uniformed fantasist in `Wishes and Wishes (Rex)’; the
`Nightsmoker’ rigged in wig and salmon pink ruff; a solitary top-hatted
clown in a cavernous landscape in `The Man Who Tells Fairy Tales’: what
makes Eloyan a significant talent is that his imaginary world is
brought into existence before our eyes through the exaggerations and
artifice of paint. The farcical costumes and masks of his prison guards
and dreamers are so thickly sculpted as to render them ridiculous, yet
the lack of definition makes them threatening, the harsh white light
interrogates and strips bare. It is a dashing spectacle with a strong
moral undercurrent: `The play’s the thing/Wherein I’ll catch the
conscience of the king.’
`Two Feet in One Shoe: Armen Eloyan’ is at Parasol Unit, London N1, to
July 20. Tel: +44 (0)20-7490 7373