How Vardges Sureniants Inspired Antoine Wagner

I acquainted myself with the festival’s early editions. How the festival looks at the genesis of contemporary art in Armenia sparked my curiosity. The festival is part of the Institute for Contemporary Art, Yerevan, and the suggestion was to implement my project inside the Karoyan Gallery working with Nazareth Karoyan himself as the curator (Nazareth being the first private gallery owner in Armenia and later a part of Venice Biennale).

Today our project moved from a virtual exchange to a site-specific installation at the National Gallery of Armenia.

What kind of project are you going to implement in the frame of ARé 2019, named, by the way, edition “Failure”?

Sentimental Analysis is the name of my exhibition at the National Gallery of Armenia. It is a response to the legend of Ara the Beautiful and Semiramis. My analysis will extend to the unseen content of some of the related artworks contributing to this legend, enlightening a few semantic coincidences.

The installation is decomposed into several mediums including Free Works (free hanging photographs on canvas mounted by wood hangers), Intermission (an animation installation with four-channel sound), video, copper and wax modular sculptures, drawings and helio-engravings. The majority of the work has been produced in Yerevan.

And what is the exact point of inspiration for this site-specific project?

The painting of “Ara the Beautiful” from the National Gallery’s permanent collection [painted in 1899 by Vardges Sureniants (1860 – 1921), an Armenian painter, sculptor, illustrator, translator, art critic, and theatre artist. He is considered to be the founder of Armenian historical painting – M.K.].

What particularly interests me is the tridimensional interaction of three time periods: legendary, 1899 (pre-digitalization) and how I could represent it in the present through my installation. The Free Works are high definition details of the painting of “Ara the Beautiful” (1899). These works are a microscopic reading of the textures of the paint and pigment, the ancient legend seen through the lens of time. The encounter of present-time technology (a high definition digital 2019 sensor and 120mm lens) and the painting of “Ara the Beautiful” from 1899 re-translates the emotion of the legend. The cyclical aspect of time is brought forward. Sentimental Analysis is a short visual poem, a haiku if you wish.

What role does the selected location play in forming the concept of the artwork itself?

Let’s start with ARé and the things we spoke about previously – the etymology of AR (being the main root for the majority of words in Armenian) and the é part standing for the verb to be. With this in mind, I visualize the festival as roots, sinking deep and wide. I connected immediately with this sublime root. Secondly, it is inspiring to be surrounded by so many great artists from the National Gallery’s collection and of course the encounter with you and your husband Nazareth. The architecture, staircase, elevators of this monumental institution also participate in sharing the emotion sought after. The scaling of the work process was important: working at first from far away via the internet, then getting even closer to the works than the human eye ever can via the 120mm macro lens, discovering the anthropomorphic shapes of the pigments of the paint.  Now it is time to allow some distance again, in a different direction. The exercise feels like landing on the moon and leaving on a new route returning with new timeless facts.

How do you see this project in your oeuvre?

Emotion and sentiment are communication, which remains the sole purpose of art. Ara inspires a character for an opera-film project I am working on. The modular copper and wax sculptures are an experiment with time and light.

All of these things are actually very inspiring. What is there about failing really?

First I look at failure within the myth: how can a sincere and loyal hero, such as Ara, encounter failure despite all his virtues? Can one capture the beauty or is its freedom and movement what defines it? “Perfection brings destruction,” in Ovid’s words.

Then I question failure in the present: Sentiment Analysis, or opinion-mining, is a modern method used to understand the reception of a particular message. Its key purpose is to analyze a body of data to understand typical human moods, emotions, and feelings expressed by it.