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Leo Krikorian's `Implied Space' challenges viewers' concepts

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  • Leo Krikorian's `Implied Space' challenges viewers' concepts

    Asheville Citizen-Times, NC
    Jan 9 2005

    Leo Krikorian's `Implied Space' challenges viewers' concepts


    photo: Special to the Citizen-Times
    Krikorian's "580 EV," an acrylic on canvas 2000

    The exhibit
    What: "IMPLIED SPACE," a retrospective exhibition of paintings,
    prints and photographs by Leo Krikorian
    Where: Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center, 56 Broadway
    When: Ongoing through April 30
    Particulars: The museum is in downtown Asheville and is open noon to
    5 pm Wednesday-Sunday
    For more information: Call 350-8484


    By Robert Godfrey
    Jan. 7, 2005 6:03 p.m.

    Leo Krikorian came from a small Armenian farming community in Fresno,
    Calif., to the Black Mountain College, near Asheville, in 1947. He
    studied with Josef Albers, who he thought was a poor teacher, and
    with Ilya Bolotowsky, who became a lifelong friend. His early major
    painting influence, however, was Piet Mondrian, with whom he did not
    study.

    The current survey of Krikorian's work at the Black Mountain College
    Museum + Art Center covers the years 1947 to 2003. This
    mini-retrospective demonstrates Krikorian's growing and continued
    interest in hard-edged geometric abstraction after he left BMC as
    well as his intermittent interest in photography - he studied with
    Ansel Adams at the Art Center School in Los Angeles.

    The four earliest paintings in this exhibition are from his student
    days at BMC in 1947 and 1948. They do show Krikorian's fascination
    with Mondrian's "Plus and Minus" and "Broadway Boogie Woogie" series,
    which were just being introduced in New York at about this time.

    But Krikorian soon left the Mondrian construct and worked from a
    color matrix that was more or less based on the theories of Johannes
    Itten. Krikorian explored the visual effect color had on changing
    backgrounds and environments. Albers' seminal work, "Homage to the
    Square," also seems to have been affected by Itten's theories.

    Krikorian's most important pieces in the BMCM+AC show are "569 EV"
    from 1999, "580 EV" and "581 EV," both from 2000, and "627 EV" from
    2003. All of these paintings are acrylic on canvas. These works are
    saturated with charged and juiced- up color that Krikorian
    encapsulates through shape and background, forcing the viewer's eye
    in and out of the picture plane with reversals of positive and
    negative positions. Everything becomes wrong, disruptive and almost
    passively assertive. The paradox of the frontal plane becoming
    spatially ambiguous happens: Gravity is misplaced and elusive. There
    are boundless optical illusions on one hand and intentional color
    manipulations on the other. The artist seems to be jerking us around.

    Krikorian, like other geometric color-charged abstractionists, plays
    with the idea of tension interrupting harmony and chaos provoking the
    cosmos. Just when you think things are settling down, visual hell
    breaks out. Shapes begin to soar and float. With Krikorian's
    paintings, there is never really a quiet moment. This is analogous to
    the way improvisational jazz works.

    If kindred spirits exist in Krikorian's universe they may be Elsworth
    Kelly and the Midwest-based painter Larry Zox. And perhaps a little
    bit of Bridget Riley. All of these artists reach beyond pattern to a
    complex compositional construction that balances shapes while
    interrupting the space and where a particular color behaves according
    to the color next to it or underneath it. Line is also an integral
    element that both bounds a shape or points it in another direction.

    In all of these artists there seems to be a conscious need to
    stimulate visual tactileness through high-intensity color that
    vibrates in relationship to a neighboring pigment. But unlike Mark
    Rothko and, at times, Barnett Newman, Krikorian - and his cohorts -
    never quite reach that state of sensual tactility, of indulging the
    sublime.

    So where does Krikorian fit within the scheme of modernism? I'm not
    quite sure. There is a large body of work that indicates his
    persistence and necessity to produce a type of work that comfortably
    adds to the sequence of hard- edge abstraction (see Larry Zox),
    optical painting (see Richard Anuszkiewicz) and even neo-geo (see
    Peter Halley). But a full study of his work and the influence he had
    on other artists has yet to be undertaken. Now in his 80s, Krikorian
    has created more than 600 major works of which he is now, according
    to a recent interview in a San Francisco paper, giving away. A
    cafeteria/auditorium at the D.H. White Elementary School in Rio
    Vista, Calif., houses a significant collection of his work. Some
    important works have been donated to restaurants. When Krikorian had
    his first solo show in Asheville, at Broadway Arts in 1990, it went
    unnoticed.

    I think Krikorian has been an important player in the art world since
    the 1950s. He will probably for the moment, however, be most
    remembered for "The Place," a bar he operated in the 1950s in San
    Francisco that became the hangout of jazz musicians, artists and the
    beat writers and poets. In fact, this writer heard, as a high school
    student in New Jersey in the late 1950s, a concert by Dave Brubeck
    who brought the house down with "Leo's Place, " a piece he had
    recently created in honor of Krikorian's bar.

    Fortunately all the works in the BMCM+AC retrospective will remain in
    Asheville as part of the museum's permanent collection. They were
    donated by the artist.

    Robert Godfrey previously served as head of the Western Carolina
    University art department. He can be reached at
    [email protected].

    http://www.citizen-times.com/cache/article/arts/73435.shtml
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