Art in America
Kamrooz Aram: Uneasy Delights
Kamrooz Aram’s paintings have a lot going on in them—explosions, showers of light, flights of nimbus-headed angels, flapping flags and pennants, whizzing snail-shaped clouds, flowers spraying from camouflage, flames shooting from vegetation and looming falcons, slurries of color drooling and dripping through spaces, shreds of bright matter wheeling in glistening skies.
Velocity and visual amplitude typify this artist’s canvases, as if he were fixing as many elements of a rapidly mutating dream as he could remember. Not that they’re formally chaotic (or invariably packed with incident); Aram is usually partial to symmetry and internal pictorial logic. Crypto-Abstract Expressionist veils and drips combine with things that are unmistakably things; the style of his work as well as its manifest content effect a hybrid-ization we could liken to a familiar but not-quite-nameable, liquefying plant, maybe one that swallows live prey.
Aram was born in Iran in 1978 and has lived in the United States since age eight. His work riffs on imagery found in Persian miniatures and carpet patterns, Shiite posters and Arabic writing, but this material figures in contexts where original cosmological systems or hortatory meanings dissolve, or blend with Western analogues. There isn’t a pointed collision of cultures in Aram’s pictures, but rather the fluid synthesis artists conjure from what they encounter in waking and dreaming life, which can be events of trauma or epiphany or, just as easily, the casually registered minutiae of a walk down the street. (Excerpt from Kamrooz Aram: Uneasy Delights By Gary Indiana. For the complete article please click the link above.)