States of Matter:The work of Eozen Agopian
These are paintings containing what Anni Albers called “the magic of things not yet found useful”. Eozen’s great success is in recognizing that the contradictions in her work are its strengths and that these must remain precariously unresolved. It is the tension of possible dissolution that is remarkable. The images themselves portray this but mostly is the artist’s judgment, her belief and her trust that are worth noting. Trust in a direct method of painting that sometimes leaves us midstream.
Dashes and blips of daylight color mark territory and create space in a loose grid format. The grid is the organizing structure though it seems to struggle to create order. It shapes the space just as the space envelops it. It is a focusing agent, a distance-er, catching us in the act of looking. The grid however functional is more importantly a state of being, like a binder on a molecular level. It is adaptive and fluid. It is the grid as biology. Eozen Agopian has created work that at once gives itself up to nature while alluding to the grimmer of orchestration. These paintings gracefully realize that formal concerns in painting have always been tied to the sublime.
The thread pieces clarify Eozen’s desire for fluidity. They exist as much beneath the canvas as above. Here the grid is clearly a screen and within it we see loose and shimmering shapes. Loose thread becomes a line drawing us between phrasings so that the whole seems like a musical score for the eyes. We can see how the artist’s vision, translated into thread permeates whatever it touches, and that this permeation binds, connects, and believes.
Yet is the ability to leave bare, to leave paint, to let be, to reveal in process that is this artist’s special touch. One might say she has a sincere vision just one might consider these two words at odds. Sincere meaning mundane and pleasant, while vision implies the foolhardy, touched or inspired. This is the precarious nature of her work. These are paintings that ask one to trust, to see the act of believing literally and as a process which in this instance is revealed in the relationship between states of matter. When one state threatens to become another we feel the barrier between the two as fluid and clarifying. In some sense they are about the magic of things, about an approach which is less pragmatic than it is hopeful.
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