For all of you art fiends in the Los Angeles area this weekend is the opening of Armenian artist Vahe Berberian's new show "Four Months in Heaven." The opening reception is Saturday May 3rd, 2008 at the Ambrogi Castanier Gallery from 6-10pm.
Vahe Berberian is one of those rare contemporary artists that can truly be defined as a renaissance man. Not only is the Armenian born artist a gifted painter, but he is also a celebrated playwright, director, and performer. His most recent play Baron Garbis, which enjoyed a successful run in North Hollywood and Pasadena, was true to form, and deeply connected to Vahe’s heritage as an Armenian and the history of that culture. Vahe’s ancestry is one of many resources for his art to feed upon. In truth Vahe is the kind of artist that allows his life experience to be fodder for his hungry and fertile imagination. He behaves like a sponge, soaking in the world, bathing in its chaos and its glory. All his hopes and fears are processed and then haphazardly poured out into his art. "I am a blender…or maybe a grinder - processing everything I consume," says Vahe, "Everything goes into this processor- the books I read, the music I listen to, the friends I have, my fears, my politics, my loves…"
One might compare Vahe’s paintings to a child’s notebook, filled with incoherent words and images, but all together a unique and intrinsic form of expression. His minimalist abstract paintings are reminiscent of cave drawings, quite raw and honest, whose progeny comes from a rather simple and innocent place.The title of the show, “Four Months in Heaven” employs this idea of revisiting simplicity; that an artist spends time in isolation, in an almost monk-like state of solitude, and the desire to express is manifested through the paint. An artist must take themselves away from the various distractions of the world and allow themselves to exist through the medium. To Vahe this experience is simultaneously liberating and centering, taking him to an almost ethereal place.
His painting process is rather primal and in many ways remarkably chaotic. Like a master chef making a stew with many ambiguous and often mysterious ingredients, Vahe blends his components until they begin to fester and bubble, juices and aromas melding together, redefining color and substance. Equal to a madman, he takes this primeval stew in his hands and begins to massage it into the canvas. His wrists and elbows begin to trace out words and figures from a forgotten memory, spelling out his secret code. He covers them with layers, scratches them out, rewrites them over and over, in a repetitive ritual of the possessed. Conjuring only the very primitive and organic substances to pour out onto the canvas.When the ceremony is finished and all the paintbrushes put away, we see scribbles of flowers and little fish swimming in faraway ocean. The illegible boats on the sea are the same boats found in Antilias, a quaint port town in Lebanon where Vahe spent his childhood. The scene is innocent and honest, and if we look closely enough the code starts to crack and we begin to see our fondest memories immerge before our eyes. Our childhood secrets and fears scratched out on the canvas. Vahe unlike any other contemporary is living, breathing, eating art. For Vahe life and art are mutually exclusive. The world is the blank canvas and his memory the paint.
The show runs from May 3rd - May31st 2008 and is highly recommended.
