Aleksandr Avagyan

Aleksandr Avagyan was born in 1990 in Yerevan, in the former Soviet Union of Armenia. He lives and works in Paris. Trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Yerevan, Aleksandr Avagyan moved to Marseille in 2012. After a short stint at the Beaux-Arts, he continued his studies in Fine Arts at the University of Aix-Marseille. Since 2014, the artist has been interested in the notions of zone, place and synthetic landscape.

Influenced by his experience of Marseille’s northern districts and having been denied the right to return to his native country for many years, his landscapes become increasingly impersonal and neutral – to the point of tending towards the abstract. Equally interested in the world’s political maps, and in self-proclaimed countries not recognized by international society, Aleksandr Avagyan’s painting attempts to embody zones of resistance.

Armed with an extremely colorful and vivid palette, his works, now abstract, leave the classical perimeter of format to spread towards more surprising forms, sometimes even three-dimensional. Tasks of color, which the painter calls “zones”, are sometimes adjacent and cohabiting, but also collide and come into conflict. Thanks to the introduction of volume, the paint takes on body and positions itself to support a wall, brace a blanket or demarcate a border.

The mediums he uses are varied: Craft paper, aluminum sheets, wooden cleats and planks, as well as cardboard and canvas. These materials, often raw and seemingly uninteresting, are mostly found, salvaged or donated. This is why the “encounter” is at the heart of his work, since it is necessary for the raw material to catch the eye. Coming from a wide variety of places, these materials contribute to the final idea of embodying an area, a synthetic landscape, a place of some kind.