Vagharshak Aramyan ... and Metaphysics

The art of Vagharshak Aramyan (1945–2006) is about engaging with the world through a transreal prism.

The world around us is visible, material, and physical; yet in human perception it has for centuries oscillated between the real and the unreal, the comprehensible and the incomprehensible, the factual and the imaginary, the material and the mystical. Rational explanations of phenomena accessible to the senses do not always prove to be sufficient, and art often becomes one of the ways of approaching the elusive layers of reality—an attempt to reach the invisible through the visible.

The art of Vagharshak Aramyan (1945–2006) is about engaging with the world through precisely such a transreal prism. In the artist’s works, bodies, faces, and objects lose their stable boundaries, assume new and sometimes impossible forms, merge with one another, and become involved in compositions governed by a strange internal logic.

On a formal level, this visual language occasionally approaches Surrealism through its fantastic metamorphoses; conceptually, however, Aramyan’s art creates closer parallels with Metaphysical Painting.

Aramyan described himself as “a man who marvels.” This sense of wonder becomes a creative principle in his art: under his gaze, the ordinary becomes extraordinary, objects become mysterious, and reality becomes infinitely open to interpretation.

The exhibition, Vagharshak Aramyan … and Metaphysics, presented at the Cafesjian Center for the Arts, encompasses a broad range of the artist’s creative legacy, only a part of which is directly related to the historical movement of Metaphysical Painting. The exhibition also presents the artist’s graphic works for the first time, most of them created in 1967–1968.

In this exhibition, metaphysics is proposed not as a definitive label for Aramyan’s art, but as a possible key to its interpretation.