ARMIN BOEHM

This complexity is not an experiment in form but rather a means to conceal the intense social narratives within the pictures. Empty cups on the banquet tables, broken masks, swaying petals, overlapping facial features, and the incorporation of the porcupine images from George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” seem to suggest the fracture and reshaping of certain identities. Through straightforward yet symbolic visual language, the power of criticism becomes more implicit and profound. This language does not attempt to directly accuse but rather triggers viewers’ reflections on power relations, social divisions and individual loneliness through the defamiliarization of symbols and the polysemy of combinations. In addition, Boehm’s use of repetitive patterns has a cold industrial aesthetic, yet sudden breaks make viewers feel a certain underlying vulnerability and unease.

His technique not only demonstrates the sense of order that may collapse at any time in contemporary society, but also the transformation process is a way for the artist to attempt to build human empathy. Through the slightly mechanical patterns and the treatment of interruptions in the pictures, the narrative is further weakened and the effect of metaphor is strengthened. Such a treatment endows his works with a sense of calm restraint all the time. The chaotic scenes are carefully crafted yet also reveal a certain repressed tension. This oppositional relationship is especially manifested in the use of colors. He likes to juxtapose warm reds and golds with cold grays and blacks, creating an emotional effect that is both attractive and alienating. The often blurry figures, dialogical spaces and broken objects in the paintings remind the audience that behind the grand appearance, there is always a hidden loneliness and alienation. This “restrained pleasure”, under the combination of the flat characteristics of the fibers themselves and the loose brushstrokes, is the artist’s rich expression of political landscapes, social phenomena and multiculturalism, and also the artist’s expression of the contradiction between “excess” and “scarcity” in modernity. In this era when everything is infinitely magnified, art sometimes does not need to please our eyes with elements from the real world.

Although Boehm’s works are full of wildness, “wandering around and feasting day and night, exploring the extreme of pleasure”, like a never-ending celebration, full of prosperity and vitality. The intense dramatic conflicts in the pictures and the restrained technical treatments are precisely the charming aspects of the works. The contrasts of colors, the collisions of materials and the superimpositions of collages release a power that combines boldness and restraints. This unease and drama are not deliberately incited but rather the freedom of emotional diversity and the stimulation of multiple perceptions, as well as the subtlety of reconnecting different structures in the fractures.