VaskenKalayjian “Abstractionist for the Millennium” by Rachel Youens

The staying power of our daily activities belies the measurements of clocks and calenders that thrust us toward the hastening of the year 2000. Remembrance of the past and very possibly the preparation for our future sets the Armenian-American artist Vsken Kalayjian on the course of his man exhibition: “Meditations” at the Cast Iron Gallery, 159 Mercer Street, New York, NY, from October 26 through November 14.

Kalayjian’s paintings are elegant mixtures of foreground and background structures and strokes in beautifully moody colors that merge into grids of varying proportions. Abstraction is the style that best conveys his memories of an Armenian family relocated to Syria, his cosmopolitan contemporary life, and his practice of Zen Buddhist meditation techniques.

His aesthetic concerns evoke the dualism where sensuality and pleasure meet the purity of no-thing, a place where, the artist states “possibilities can emerge.” The surfaces of his paintings murmur a consolidation of what their depths imply: a distant memory, just beyond reach. The role of the foreground grids often changes as the artist’s focus shifts. In “Where Realms Mingle” Kalayjian encloses lanes of muted red and yellow by tall narrow bands of harsh blues. He leaves broader softer areas of territory, defined by a muted horizontal grid in “Empty of Mind.” “Myriad Forms” offers a breakthrough past the grid as the blanketed space from below surges forward and upward. In “Carousel” Kalayjian uses brushed transparent washes of muted blacks over strawberry reds and pine greens, sandwiched by velvety creams. His grid is stretched to the width of woolen fibers that float palpably downward across the forest of brushwork. This lush, contemplative image floats above a gravitational field.

The aritist’s knowledge and emotional connections to Armenian and Arabic, languages he knows but from which he is geographically and culturally dissociated, and his acquired elements of Japanese calligraphy, constitute a linear whispering motif that runs across the surface of his paintings.

In outlook he is close to Cy Twombly, Mark Tobey, or Susan Rothenberg, each of whom personalizes the flux of ambiguous materiality. Arshille Gorky’s vision of retrieved symbolic memories synthesized through observation of natural spectacle, contrasts with Kalayjian’s emphasis on the field as object of expression.