REPETITION, COVERING, AND TABULA RASA: The research paintings of Benji Boyadgian
When looking at beautiful tiles, what is often forgotten is what is covered. The act of tiling repeatedly hides rough surfaces and makes spaces sanitized and more manageable. A clean, shiny new surface is installed which then serves as a functional space inside which time-full activities and histories can then start to impact the surface from the outside. When looking at beautiful tiles, the tiles are already there, they are a fact of nature.
This then is the temporality where Boyadgian’s paintings land. The landscape painting he uses to document ancient ruins that are about to be destroyed shows nature, his home, as the surface that must be cleaned before industry and occupation can cover it with their tiles: roads, houses, walls, all creating the new surfaces on which inhabitants can then live their lives and onto which their histories get recorded. These paintings are contemplative and analytical. They emit a sense of wanting to record the artefacts and memories associated with the ruins and the society that created the ruins, but they also want to reveal the psychotic mechanism geared towards destroying social fabric and living history in an effort to create a tabula rasa, a clean slate. They are snapshots of the surface right before the fixing agent is applied, right before the tile is applied to the fixing agent.
The tile paintings then take this surface to its logical conclusion. In these paintings the tiles become repetitive, even obsessive and controlling. It feels like the only thing that stops their expansion into space from the paper are the frames and the air gap between the paper and other objects. And even then, the painting is repeated in another similar painting.
Confined to a location, the tiles then turn around and start morphing, pushing and pulling each other until the force becomes too great and they lose their rigid nature and begin climbing over and eating each other in an effort to take over territory. I am reminded of the mental process of strategizing over a Go board, influence territory, attack directly, surround and eat your enemy, command area, survive till the end, win. At this point Boyadgian’s real task begins. He wants to understand how it is that these simple tiles become so strategic. How these flat objects with beautiful surfaces that have their own histories can hide so much of what they cover, and it is his unique position in time and space, and his understanding that this is what is happening, that allows him to paint precisely this process.
Boyadgian does this by entering into the medium of watercolour and it is through this medium that he is able to communicate that between the viewer and the covered history. It is not that the erasure of the colours, or their transparency, reveal the history of the object.
Repeatedly only one thing emerges from this archaeological process. Underneath the painted decorative surface, which can give so much beauty to the world, is the white paper. A blank wall and document onto which to project desires for different futures. Seen this way the landscape paintings take on a new meaning. The white paper on which they are painted is the document appropriated from this use of desire projection. It no longer acts as a suppressive tool to conceptually cover nature and reimagine an alternative from white nothingness.
In the landscape paintings the white becomes the place and the bright air, it becomes the translucent body onto which shadows mark themselves speaking of a world between histories, of a world in rotation.
When looking at beautiful tiles, what is often forgotten is what is covered. The act of tiling repeatedly hides rough surfaces and makes spaces sanitized and more manageable. A clean, shiny new surface is installed which then serves as a functional space inside which time-full activities and histories can then start to impact the surface from the outside. When looking at beautiful tiles, the tiles are already there, they are a fact of nature.
This then is the temporality where Boyadgian’s paintings land. The landscape painting he uses to document ancient ruins that are about to be destroyed shows nature, his home, as the surface that must be cleaned before industry and occupation can cover it with their tiles: roads, houses, walls, all creating the new surfaces on which inhabitants can then live their lives and onto which their histories get recorded. These paintings are contemplative and analytical. They emit a sense of wanting to record the artefacts and memories associated with the ruins and the society that created the ruins, but they also want to reveal the psychotic mechanism geared towards destroying social fabric and living history in an effort to create a tabula rasa, a clean slate. They are snapshots of the surface right before the fixing agent is applied, right before the tile is applied to the fixing agent.
The tile paintings then take this surface to its logical conclusion. In these paintings the tiles become repetitive, even obsessive and controlling. It feels like the only thing that stops their expansion into space from the paper are the frames and the air gap between the paper and other objects. And even then, the painting is repeated in another similar painting.
Confined to a location, the tiles then turn around and start morphing, pushing and pulling each other until the force becomes too great and they lose their rigid nature and begin climbing over and eating each other in an effort to take over territory. I am reminded of the mental process of strategizing over a Go board, influence territory, attack directly, surround and eat your enemy, command area, survive till the end, win. At this point Boyadgian’s real task begins. He wants to understand how it is that these simple tiles become so strategic. How these flat objects with beautiful surfaces that have their own histories can hide so much of what they cover, and it is his unique position in time and space, and his understanding that this is what is happening, that allows him to paint precisely this process.
Boyadgian does this by entering into the medium of watercolour and it is through this medium that he is able to communicate that between the viewer and the covered history. It is not that the erasure of the colours, or their transparency, reveal the history of the object.
Repeatedly only one thing emerges from this archaeological process. Underneath the painted decorative surface, which can give so much beauty to the world, is the white paper. A blank wall and document onto which to project desires for different futures. Seen this way the landscape paintings take on a new meaning. The white paper on which they are painted is the document appropriated from this use of desire projection. It no longer acts as a suppressive tool to conceptually cover nature and reimagine an alternative from white nothingness.
In the landscape paintings the white becomes the place and the bright air, it becomes the translucent body onto which shadows mark themselves speaking of a world between histories, of a world in rotation.
