The transformative abstractions of Vasken Kalayjian at Cast Iron Gallery by Ed McCormack

It is highly unusual for an artist to totally transform an exhibition space without resorting to conceptual trickery or creating an installation of environmental sculpture. For this reason, among several others, the critically acclaimed solo show of Vasken Kalayjian, which will be held again at Cast Iron Gallery, 159 Mercer Street, from December 3 to 24, is a must-see.

Kalayjian harks back to the glory days of Abstract Expressionism without being in any way retrograde or indulging in fashionable irony. Like a painterly soul brother of the late John Lennon at his reckless best, Kalayjian displays his heart boldly on his sleeve and wears his sincerity like an amulet. Because he truly believes in art as a spiritual calling, he has no fear of investing his paintings with honest passion or of succumbing to an excess of emotion when he is moved by inspiration. Thus, his pictures possess a lyricism verging on the rhapsodic, and to encounter a large group of them in a gallery is an experience not unlike stumbling unexpectedly upon a natural wonder in the midst of the concrete jungle.

As titles such as “Meditation” and “Where Realms Mingle” indicate, the greater majority of Kalayjian’s paintings concern themselves with spiritual matters, striving, as the artist puts it, to “achieve a sense of transcendence”–and nowhere does he succeed more splendidly than in the four related assemblage paintings he calls “Windows on the Sacred.” In each of these oils on board, energetically stroked color areas, suggesting luminous skies above fields of tall grass, are interrupted by four even spaced windowlike recessions painted serenely in a single hue. The series evokes brilliantly the world-cancelling enlightenment that can be attained only in a state of deep meditation.

Prominent among the gestural elements with which Kalayjian enlivens the surfaces of his paintings are eloquent linear forms that derive from his study of Japanese calligraphy, as well as his knowledge of Arabic and Armenian writing. While the former are employed as bold compositional ballast, the latter are often inscribed, as though with the pointed handle of a brush, into thickly impastoed color areas, creating a tactile liveliness akin to the faux-Arabic calligraphy of Brion Gysin.

In his “Negation Series,” thickly pigmented strokes and forbidding grids impinge upon luminous color fields, while “Before This Alter to the God Progress” is a majestic and impassioned plea for ecological sanity, with its looming brown and silvery gray forms overlaid by a dark calligraphy as dense as black smoke. Along with the equally powerful “Revealing the Dark Side,” these works present a stark, yet necessary, contrast to paintings such as “Transcendence” and “Pristine Awareness,” two of his most coloristically sumptuous and spiritually uplifting large oils.

“My work is a very personal part of myself,” Vasken Kalayjian has stated. “It’s where my psyche and spirituality dance together. It transcends time and space, and it connects to the infinite. I can say that it’s a religious experience for me.”