Rosamund Felsen Gallery

Gegam Kacherian will open the fall season at Rosamund Felsen Gallery with a second solo show featuring new paintings. The Los Angeles-based, Armenian-American painter fascinates and beguiles with his depictions of highly-detailed sites, people, and animals connected to each other in mysterious flourishes of virtuosic abstraction.

The acrylics on canvas all emerge out of atmospheric ethers of color-- neon clouds, heavenly blues, and fuchsia skies. Animals, people and buildings populate the paintings-- sometimes floating, other times earth-bound. The imagery Kacherian uses come from a restless curiosity of the world, its animals and people and a fascination with how humans have built it. After populating his canvases with hyper-detailed figuration, Kacherian overlays a multitude of abstract painterly explosions. They are improvisations of beautifully articulated techniques, or "smears, puddles and dollops of paint, some splashed swiftly and mixed vigorously and others applied delicately, with the fussiness of a perfectionist," in David Pagel's words (Los Angeles Times, Aug. 1, 2008.)

The accumulation of these distinct layers, resulting in varying balances of abstraction and figuration, add up to fantasies that are sometimes neo-surreal and sometimes intensely pop.