Phantomium
Argišt Alaverdyan
The name Phantomium derives from the English word phantom /ˈfæn.təm/, which can be used as both a noun and an adjective. It denotes a phenomenon, being or object that seems real even though it does not exist: a spectre or an apparition. Argišt Alaverdyan’s series Vibrations and Phantomium capture the tonality of temporary configurations of which only residual matter remains visible. This matter testifies to their former existence, which may be reality, or may be illusion.
Acrylic spray paint and white graphite create a haze of graduated shades of grey on the canvas, which in places turns into a flicker reminiscent of the grain of analogue screens. This is Vibrations, a series of thirty paintings in which waves, arcs, brackets and spirals emerge from a seeming blur or visualised noise. It is as if the signal that allows us to glimpse these small yet complex scenes for a brief moment were gradually fading before our eyes.
The trio of medium-format paintings belongs to the Phantomium series. Phantomium is a fictional element of a non-existent periodic table of phantoms, spectres and entities that may have evolved from virtual worlds, or may have been here with us all along. The three paintings take shape on a grainy surface in a violet tonality. The white drawings on these textures are spectral in their position between abstraction and the concrete, and recall misty vapours or wisps of steam.
They explore a certain lightness, in which the depicted phenomena drift through space, hover, and some even grin pleasantly at their beholder. They draw on the aesthetics of emoticons, blended with an almost Lovecraftian, sublime and primordial monstrosity and its iconography. The entities rising out of the noise carry something both contemporary and mysteriously ancient, and may awaken in us a strange nostalgia whose origin we cannot pin down.
Together, Vibrations and Phantomium point to the transience and urgency of a unique “here and now”, an unrepeatable moment shaped by forces beyond our control. In the gallery, they are complemented by site-specific wall drawings that echo the undulating motifs of the paintings. These lines then become the ground for the hanging paintings themselves. We become witnesses to moments of appearing and vanishing, of formation and deformation. Alaverdyan’s drawings are a kind of imaginative record: notional drawn photographs that capture, with scientific precision, moments in which a certain spectral matter is present.