Leo Krikorian's `implied Space' Challenges Viewers

[Siamanto]

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

rgodfrey@buncombe.main.nc.us.

 

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