Dear friends,
We are pleased to invite you to the opening of the exhibition “Leo Leo Vardanyan: The Path of Matter”, taking place on February 13 at 19:00, at the ICA Gallery (Avet Avetisyan 47).
The exhibition is the coursework of the students of the ICA’s ARMAN GRIGORYAN School of Art Criticism and Curatorial Studies, 2024-2026 academic year.
Curators:
Antaram Azatyan, Mary Moon, Emma Muradyan, Nazeli Utujyan
Concept Development Studio (Nazaret Karoyan), Project Production and Management Studio (Carine Aroyan and Lilit Grigoryan), Exhibition Architecture Studio (Ruben Arevshatyan).
The exhibition will be open for 1 month.Admission is free.
About the Exhibition
With his new project The Path of the Matter, Leo Leo Vardanyan seeks to reveal the “backstage” or “behind-the-scenes” aspects of the creative process and to show the audience something that usually does not appear in exhibition halls.
What does a painting represent? Is it always only what we see on the canvas once the image is already “framed”? And how should we describe the state in which a work has not yet been “born” — when there is something in the artist’s mind that is still uncertain? What should be done with that uncertainty: with the remnants of paint left on the palette, when the artist considers the work complete and ready for exhibition?
By filming the scraping of paint residues, the artist shows how he cleans the palette of traces from the work he has just completed. However, the camera’s focus is not on the cleaned palette itself, but on the button-like masses that emerge through this act of “cleaning.” Each of these “miniatures” gives the impression of being an independent work of art, possessing its own nuances and structural expressiveness. Yet this impression is only apparent — an illusion. In reality, each miniature “remembers” the colors flowing through its veins and “involuntarily” reproduces the chromatic essence of the canvas created from the same paints.
