Sanam Khatibi, Armen Eloyan

WEDNESDAY 07.09.17 at 20,00h ­

Brussels art days opening!

Vitrine Sanam Khatibi + a talk by Armen Eloyan

NICC is very proud to present a new vitrine presentation by Iranian born and Brussels based painter Sanam Khatibi + a talk by Armenian born and Zurich based painter Armen Eloyan. The talk is hosted by Matteo Lucchetti.

Far from the tiresome old farts fighting over the essences, fundaments, deaths and rebirths of painting, and far from the cool kids celebrating the new, the post-, the bad or the naive, Khatibi’s autodidactic strand of painting functions as an untimely vision-making machine. Her works do not pretend to be a window on, or mirror of the world, a masterful act of mimicry that allows us to enjoy finding the seven differences. Nor do they want to theorize or manoeuvre themselves into yet another contemporary painterly position. Similar to Bosch or Rousseau, Khatibi rather envisions what is in the mind’s eye, and thus creates spaces where influences intersect – from personal backgrounds to objects to words to stories to music to films to conversations.

Like a writer, a painter in principle does not need an excess of money, technicity or human resources to produce a space that is alive with thematic, iconographic narrative. Everything is within arm’s reach: the material, as well as the images and ideas. In Khatibi’s case, these are the simple ingredients for human fantasies of nature, or better: for nature as a human fantasy. One could look at them as a still story, a collection of motifs and figures rather than narrative elements: enclosures of plants and bathing parties peopled with beasts and women getting themselves into all sorts of mischief, trapped as they are in what seems to be a self-sufficient, quirky reverie of unity. They show ambiguous places of shapes and forms beyond good and evil, not exactly exotic but very reminiscent of romantic dreams of the primitive, definitely artificial, painterly and cultured, but also organic and as easy as pop songs.

For NICC’s vitrine, the artist produced a large tapestry (260 cm / 220 cm) based on one of her paintings. As the title suggests, it is set in ‘The hollow in the ferns’, a very human place that is strangely filled with the tentacles of its natural counterpart. In translating the image to another medium, the motif-like abstraction structure of what first seemed figurative becomes even more apparent. It makes you wonder: what are these pale-women- shaped things playing with?

For the opening evening, NICC is proud to host a talk by the Armenian painter Armen Eloyan, though his visceral work is stylistically wildly different from Khatibi’s, it is not hard to
see affinities in the attitude with which both artists avoid the hardships of painting.