Contemporary spiritual artist, Armen Agop returns to exhibit the fruit of his most recent research at Flora Bigai Arte Contemporanea. Sculptor and painter, the Egyptian artist further develops his original reflection on the material, black granite, which comes from distant lands, bringing with it a story full of meanings; evocative and yet minimal, the granite sculpture invites a meditative approach. An approach which takes all the time necessary to walk around it, thus changing the point of view which in turn gives different inclinations, even surprises, because the opera, according to Armen, is never static but always changing.
Paintings and sculptures interact as two formal expressions of the same concept. On the walls there are paintings from the MANTRA series, in which the artist chose to work with the soberness of the smallest element, .01 pen tip, and by repeating the same gesture over and over, a gestural mantra in essence, created universes on canvas. Through this ritual of gesture, and Taking Time with the material, the artist manages to chase the light out from the darkness.
The spiritually charged sculptures and paintings of different sizes, round and square, are executed with the usual skill and perhaps most importantly, the element of time. Armen explains in his dialogue with the critic Luca Beatrice, curator of the exhibition. “I think what unites the latest works of painting and sculpture is the element of time, because the time passed during the working process corresponds to the raw material, granite. My work consists of the time shared with the material because granite requires a very long process, and I have tried this same thing with painting, I have even exaggerated, the time taken is even more important than the final result. It is an obsessive process, chasing the light in absolute darkness ”.
In the exhibition, along with the 10 paintings, Agop exposes three large granite sculptures circular in shapes, yet not entirely regular. The black granite is flanked by a less usual material in his poetics, white bronze and a dark bronze triptych.
