Free admission on the occasion of the Contemporary Days to the exhibition 'Arshak Sarkissian. Angels and Demons'.
The exhibition, curated by Dominique Lora, is dedicated to the Armenian artist Arshak Sarkissian, an emerging figure in contemporary art, and presents a rich selection of paintings, drawings, engravings and installations. Arshak Sarkissian (1981) lives and works between Jerevan and London. He started his artistic career at a very young age, combining the spirit of the classical world with contemporary elements and creating surreal characters, between reality and invention, inspired by the masters of art history and the Armenian folk tradition. Curator Dominique Lora introduces the exhibition in Aosta as follows: "The artist is an emblematic son of his era as he experienced the end of the Soviet empire and the complex transition that resulted. Like a polyphonic researcher who goes beyond the design dimension of his work, he experiments with and alternates expressive media such as painting, drawing, graphics, sculpture and installation, playing with signs, symbols and materials that, like Babelic idioms, mingle, overlap and reorganise. His vision of the world begins and is fulfilled through works steeped in memory, colour, ancient and modern forms, imbued with humour and dense with collective drama". Sarkissian's compositions are enlivened by bizarre figures, acrobats, commoners, storytellers, madmen, fishermen, monkeys, strange anthropomorphic animals and freaks, caressed by a fixed and absorbed light. The artist portrays unusual subjects, whose body often becomes an emblem, an essential means of expression to which an alienating beauty is bestowed. Grotesque characters in classical poses, with faces of composed expression, reveal the drama of a magnetic humanity that attracts. His iconography is inspired by the everyday and a familiar world, treated with a melancholic detachment that gives his subjects a magical, elusive, unreal aura. "Arshak's painting," writes Daria Jorioz, Head of Exhibition Activities, in the catalogue, "has been nourished by the lesson of restless masters such as Jieronymus Bosch, Francisco de Goya and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, it has looked to the dreamlike dimension of Surrealism and Max Ernst in particular, it has been inspired by the whole history of art, perhaps even from the disturbing photographs of Diane Arbus and the alienating visions of Matthew Barney, to arrive at a personal and highly effective synthesis, which gives us a vision of the present that is complex but also firmly rooted in the past, from which very different artistic suggestions are grasped and reworked, without any preclusions". Also on show at the Saint-Bénin Centre in Aosta are drawings and engravings inspired by the subject of Freak Shows and Francisco de Goya's Caprichos.