Talar Aghbashian
∗1981, Beirut, Lebanon
Lebanese-Armenian artist Talar Aghbashian questions our relationship with the natural landscape through paintings that never represent a specific place, but are rather abstractions of landscapes and ruins. The works, all produced with oil paint on canvas, maintain a certain ambiguity: it is hard to tell whether the subject is a mountain range, a forest or the outline of a city, a volcanic eruption or a derelict building. Some paintings seem to depict lands submerged by water, where the artist imagines a past when mountains were coral reefs, or near-futures in which glaciers melted by global warming will turn valleys into basins of water. The works on show at Pontives are characterised by a palette that focuses on cold colours – blacks, greys, blues and greens – in which the slow build-up of pictorial layers contrasts with a fast stroke that makes the subjects dynamic and vital. They are populated by figures in which the human form and the landscape are fused into a single entity, poised between the landscape and the human body, united by their being alive. It almost seems as if the artist wishes to invite the viewer not just to contemplate the landscape as a fixed, unchanging entity, but to take part in the life unfolding on the horizon.
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