Armen Eloyan’s large-format impasto paintings, presented here in his first solo exhibition in Switzerland, have sinister, cryptic titles like Disaster and Bend Over. Though they are painted in dark colors, their dense content is always leavened by irony or wry humor. Familiar cartoon characters—Mickey Mouse, Pettersson and Findus, and a figure that looks like Scrooge McDuck—populate the canvases of this thirty-nine-year-old Armenian, who lives in Amsterdam and Zurich. These characters have ended up in very strange places, among them a dark field, where a demented Mickey tramples another character. It is a battlefield straight out of Goya; behind Mickey a white rabbit lies in its own blood, an arrow piercing its heart. There is also an oppressive interior, in which a leather-clad dominatrix bends over an anonymous figure lying on a bed. Though these bodies are often suggested by only a few brushstrokes, their corporeal presences and the thickly applied paint are very powerful. In contrast, other sections of the paintings—usually open windows or television screens—are painted thinly and somewhat brightly, like peepholes onto a more noble world. Eloyan loves a theatrical performance: Executing his paintings is a fiercely physical, intense act, and his figures always seem to be on stage, positioned according to the laws of classical perspective. The enigmatic details, hidden among the shadows of the display-cabinet curtains, reveal themselves only after two or three looks.
Translated from German by Jane Brodie.
