Unraveling Print

It is quite a world Jack Avetisyan conjures, a world born of incongruity and yet seeming whole and logical to the eye. On the one hand, Avetisyan the bemused observer of human foible, satirizes the ambition and vanity of our species with the deft, animated line of a social satirist, mocking our self-deluding attitudes with a caricaturist’s flair. On the other hand, Avetisyan the diehard modernist sets his stylized figures, and the welter of lines that describes them, within roiling fields of abstraction, turning his wit into wild displays of formal virtuosity. An Avetisyan painting or drawing is two things at once, an arch cartoon and a vigorous abstract composition; we close one eye to see one thing, the other eye to see the other, but we can’t really pull the two supposedly disparate pictorial languages, much less pictorial messages, apart. Both languages, and messages, are integral to Avetisyan’s vision: he’s the one who closes one eye and then the other. By American Art Critic Peter Frank