GEGAM KACHERIAN PAINTINGS AT ROSAMUND FELSEN GALLERY
Los Angeles Times
Sept 18 2009
There is something wonderfully peculiar about the paintings of Gegam
Kacherian, but it’s difficult to pinpoint just what it is. Each of the
15 works in his second solo show at Rosamund Felsen Gallery begins
in a reasonable, even orthodox manner with an aerial view of a city
skyline, or else the billowing clouds of a turbulent sky-scape. He
has a knack for spatial atmospherics and most of these scenes would
make for very handsome compositions in their own right. Over these,
however, he layers a whirling miscellany of fantastical imagery:
animals, figures, flora, architecture, and various totemic objects,
all wound in ectoplasmic strands of abstract pigment.
It is a view of the physical world splattered with flashes of
mystical consciousness. Horses gallop through the clouds; a man in
a bowler hat rides on the back of an owl; snake-like tendrils weave
in and out of free floating Modernist buildings. There are elephants,
horses, leopards, lions, panda bears, swans, owls, and a rhinoceros. A
female dancer in ceremonial dress makes several seemingly auspicious
appearances.
The peculiarity lies less in the surrealistic quality of the imagery,
however, than in the rather kooky formal and pictorial dynamics. The
landscapes are lavishly rendered and highly dimensional, stretching
miles, it seems, beyond the surface of the canvas. The overlaid
imagery hovers resolutely in the foreground, as if cast across the
surface of a window, leaving the middle-ground awkwardly vacant.
The landscapes, moreover, are massive; the surface imagery is quite
small and generally all out of scale: a tiny horse, an enormous owl,
etc. The clouds are full-bodied and lush; the abstract elements as
slight and wispy as feathers. The skies hearken back to 19th century
traditions of the sublime — Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran —
while the foreground imagery suggests contemporary fantasy illustration
with a splash of Salvador Dalí. The abstract flourishes seem to have
no precedent at all.
Given all of this, as well as the highly charged, often downright
psychedelic palette, these could — perhaps should — have been
frightfully ugly paintings: gaudy, awkward, excessively cluttered
and chaotic.
But they’re not. They’re enchanting: visually ravishing, filled with
strange and beguiling narratives, and — a rare quality indeed —
utterly distinctive. Kacherian, who lives in Los Angeles but studied
art in the early 1980s in his home country of Armenia, adheres to
the idioms of contemporary painting — this is not "outsider art" —
without conforming to any particular ideology, which leaves the work
feeling both relevant and fresh. One could imagine aligning it with
various camps of L.A. quasi-Surrealism (Jim Shaw, Sharon Ellis or
Nancy Jackson), but ultimately it demands to be read on its own terms.