‘Cutting edge’
Albuquerque Museum displays paintings, prints by Paul Sarkisian
The work of Paul Sarkisian crosses borders, composition, movements and materials.
Paintings and prints by the Santa Fe-based artist will hang in the lobby and throughout the Albuquerque Museum as part of its summer artist-inresidence program beginning Tuesday, Aug. 1.
Consisting of seven works and about five smaller pieces, the show has been organized like a mini-exhibition. Past artists-in-residence splashed paint across the museum walls (think pueblo-meetssci fi conjurer Virgil Ortiz).
Sarkisian “simply has been at the cutting edge of contemporary painting since the ’60s,” curator Andrew Connors said.
An abstract painter in the 1950s, Sarkisian turned to gargantuan, hyperrealistic imagery in the 1960s and ’70s. Along the way, he explored surrealism, minimalism and maximalism. By the 1980s, he was bridging stylistic boundaries.
Sarkisian’s 1980 “Untitled (Painting No. 4),” currently hanging in the museum’s “Common Ground” exhibition, reveals a menage of materials and trompe l’oeil techniques that fool visitors into thinking a meticulously painted object is a folded newspaper, complete with what appears to be a photograph of a roaring locomotive. The piece is tactile enough that security guards placed a barrier before it to prevent touching. Sarkisian framed the work in panels of glitter.
“It’s the whole idea of illusion and perspective,” Connors said. “I just find it a great adventure into, what are we looking at? You don’t have to know anything about art to understand his work.”
By the 1990s, Sarkisian had adopted a more minimalist approach, reducing carefully rendered objects into their most basic shapes. “Untitled (right leaning red 51),” 2005, is typical of his ability to bring vitality and life to hard-edged abstraction in puzzle form. The full image looks like the wing of a bird, or an organic spaceship.
“It is packed with motion and internal movement and because of its clean, hard edges and elegant proportions, it is easy to lose sight of the shape’s origins as a scribble, or simple squiggle of overlapping loops,” Connors said.
“(Untitled)(El Paso),” 1971-72, appeared in a major SITE Santa Fe exhibition of Sarkisian’s work in 2005. Part homage to the French neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, it appropriates one of Ingres’ virginal nudes, adding an upside-down sheep that conceals the face. The result is a fractured hybrid of figurative painting and surrealism.
“He’s constantly pushing people’s perceptions as to what art-making is about,” Connors said.
Now nearing 90, the Chicago-born Sarkisian first came to New Mexico from California for a residency at the Tamarind Institute. He later moved to Cerrillos, then to Santa Fe.
“He was always trying to experiment,” Connors said. “It means an artist like Sarkisian is hard to pigeonhole.”