NARINE
Despite its raw, even aggressive use of material, texture, and color the painting of Narine Isajanyan displays restrained, circumspect refinement. For all her emphasis on gesture, surface, and bold contrast, Isajanyan is a minimalist, confining her forms and her formats to simple iterations, compositions that are not so much seen as felt by the eye. In this regard Isajanyan absorbs the lessons of the Light & Space movement – California’s version of minimalism – and its succeeding phenomenon in Los Angeles, material abstraction. Material abstraction stresses the optically sensual by leaving materials in their raw state or even subjecting them to natural processes of erosion and chemical transformation. Isajanyan reinterprets these conditions into the muted elegance and traditional painterliness of the shared Bunker aesthetic. Peter Frank
~ 64 ~
