RAFFI KALENDERIAN
b. 1981, United StatesRaffi Kalenderian paints disaffected portraits of his young, ambivalent-looking friends against an ultra-flat two-dimensional space, the patterns on clothing and furniture forming elaborate abstractions. ‘The social aspect is incredibly meaningful to me,’ he has said of his practice. ‘Technology can be so isolating, so sitting with a friend for a few hours and observing them, talking, is a great way to slow things down.’ His work attempts to capture a total moment, not merely the sitter in isolation from their environment but the complete psychological framework in which they exist (sometimes depicting a doppelganger alongside his subjects to this end).
As a painter of modern life in the sense defined by Charles Baudelaire in his seminal essay of the same name Kalenderian employs painterly means to explore the possibility of illustrating contemporaneity in portrait form. Following a rich tradition of portrait art from Matisse to Hockney, Kalenderian succeeds in defining the figures’ psychology through the surrounding space, so establishing a universal quality yet lending a complex visualization to the portrait subject. The artists’ friends function as motifs of an investigation, therefore, which ranges from painterly issues to considerations of identity and the social, taking up current debates about the self and constructed identities. Raffi Kalenderian took part in numerous international solo and group exhibitions in the USA and Europe.
In 2016 Kalenderian was part of the exhibition Painters’ Painters at the Saatchi Gallery in London, UK. In 2010 his works were on show at the Next Generation exhibition at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland.
Text courtesy Buchmann Galerie.
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