Art Review: Gegam Kacherian paintings at Rosamund Felsen Gallery

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.

Which is a pleasure.

--Holly Myers

Rosamund Felsen Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., B4, Santa Monica, (310) 828-8488, through Oct. 10. Closed Sunday and Monday

Above: Fire Swan Credit: Photo by Grant Mudford

Comments

[Donald Frazell]

Looks like the diorama kits we had as kids, with backgrounds of primeaval ages, the savana, or jungle, with peel off sticky figures of dinosaurs, lions, and monkeys to place where we want.

It is time to put aside childish things,
sigh. art collegia delenda est

[Gary Sanders]

It’s great to see Gegam’s work make it from the LA Art Association 825 to Bergamot. I sometimes feel sorry for our glorious art world. Too often we find established artists in established galleries, creating small meaningless pieces that have been done to death while not adding nothing new to the conversation of a particular style. I did not get to them all but the three I liked are: William Turner’s if you want to see some good sculptures, LACMA - the 2 colliding houses - a must see, and Phantom Gallery (two blocks east of ACE) featuring large brilliant paintings, once again, by an unrecognized artist Kimber Berry. (Another 825 prodigy)

I sometimes feel the art critics are too soft which is not good for collectors. Right now I can walk into ACME and buy work that is lacking composition, color and size, or go pick up a Kacherian or a Berry, and have something that I can scan over and over, finding new details that are not boring - all the new things they add to the conversation of paint and its history.