New York Kamrooz Aram/Of Flame and Splendour Perry Rubenstein Gallery February 26, 2009 – April 9, 2009

Everything Scatter, 2008

Apocalyptic and visionary, New York-based Kamrooz Aram’s paintings repeatedly

reconfigure a stock set of highly stylized elements – falcons, star bursts, floral patterns from Persian carpets, angelic figures and spiral clouds from Persian miniatures – into sublime meditations on exoticism, mysticism, war and violence. Executed in a vivid palette, the canvases also draw inspiration from the compositional symmetry, kitsch divine light and airbrushed gleam of Shiite religious posters from Aram’s native Iran, their luminosity enhanced through his use of glistening oil paint. The often bomb-astic visuals are matched by wry but magniloquent titles, derived from the triumphal language of revolutionary zeal - be it of modernist, nationalist or religious ilk, of Western or Eastern origin. While the drawings and paintings in “Of Flame and Splendour,” Aram’s latest exhibition at New York’s Perry Rubenstein Gallery, continued to mine this rich vein they evinced his shifting formal and painterly concerns.

The four meticulous ink drawings, from Aram’s ongoing Mystical Visions and Cosmic Vibrations series – its collective title a line from Allen Ginsberg’s America (1956) – all featured the floating heads of stern mullahs. In one, a pair in profile share a gigantic turban, their spouted bombast transformed into delicate multicolored foliage; in another, the face barely emerges out of an exquisite haze of tiny colored dots.

The other two functioned as a before and after diptych of sorts; in the first, a mullah’s sullen face is dwarfed by a gigantic turban, swollen with the mystical force and authoritarian hubris he symbolizes. In the pendant image, freed from their binds, his copious locks radiate out, a physical metaphor for mystical expansiveness and transcendence that appears more universal than culturally specific. Luscious but precisely executed, Aram’s paintings manage to simultaneously revel in his preferred symbols as markers of the exotic East while questioning the very conditions of this exoticism. Through repeated but varying use, Aram abstracts and aestheticizes the symbols, leaving them readily recognizable but resolutely indeterminate, pushing their capacity for signification to its very limits. Hovering in spatially and temporally indefinite settings these signs become arbitrary and, hence, allegorical, literally floating signifiers open to a multitude of possible interpretations. In light of the recent history of conflict in the Middle East, one possible reading of these works is as oblique critiques of the United States’ disastrous involvement in the region. Indeed, the ethereal green he repeatedly uses recalls the otherworldly glow of the United States military’s night vision technologies while the eye-catching flashes of light read as both a sublime patriotic firework display and an unnerving war time sky littered with explosions and tracer fire. Similarly, in previous works, Aram has used camouflage patterns, lined by herbaceous borders that resemble elements of Arabic script, to render the ground. In his latest canvases, these patterns have taken a decidedly scatological turn; executed in thick earth-toned impasto they resemble sticky, steaming piles of shit. The Pinnacle of Pride and Inherited Glory (2008) – whose title, like the exhibition’s title, is a phrase from “The Land of The Two Rivers,” Iraq’s national anthem under Saddam Hussein – featured such a pile at its center, against a gradated yellow background, with flowery stalks emerging out of its sides. A golden ornament, encircled by a ring of kitsch shiny star stickers, perversely crowned it, the painting signaling the depravity that lurks beneath the grandiloquence of nationalism. In Supreme Elevation II (2008), a falcon was perched atop another such pile, its head at the apex of a dazzling chartreuse vortex, while the composition was reversed in Everything Scatter (2008), with two piles pushed to the edges, revealing an expanse of early morning sky. The claws and feathery remains of a disintegrated falcon floated in between, the canvases together marking the dazzling triumph and eventual dissolution of a national icon.

From the Series ‘Mystical Visions and Cosmic Vibrations’, 2008

Rally At the Gates (2008)

With their looser brushwork and less rigidly structured compositions, the two other works signaled Aram’s shifting painterly concerns. In Rally At the Gates (2008), a diffuse pyramid of variously shaped turquoise and yellow standards - reminiscent of alams commonly used in Shiite religious processions but flying wispy candy pink and purple pennants – rose above a gathering of feathery blue clouds. A golden mosque like dome topped it, like a cherry topping a monumental ice cream sundae. While The New Vortex Plunges Into the Heart of the Present (2008), the exhibition’s highlight, included familiar elements, like explosions, a falcon, a flag, a winged angel and arrays of curlicue clouds, all set against a deep purple and emerald green night sky, these signs were dispersed somewhat haphazardly across the composition. A splattering of reds and pinks, in pencil shaving like shapes, the atomized remnants of a bird or of flowers, and a cascade of oily black marks that only at times congealed into calligraphic or ornamental patterning added to the disorder. The wordy title is derived from the 1914 Vorticist manifesto, which, composed in the months preceding the First World War, is littered with martial metaphors that fetishize the shock and energy of explosions as the jolts necessary to shake up the status quo. While the martial iconography, decentered composition and dynamic brushwork of Aram’s painting appear to align it with the historical movement’s aesthetic radicalism, this reference is not without a healthy dose of skepticism. Instead, Aram’s latest canvases suggest a more general iconoclasm, a marked shift towards the gradual disintegration of discrete signs into light and paint, a semiotic transcendence of sorts.

Murtaza Vali