In the times of pandemic, war, isolation and general uncertainty, boredom and apathy seem to become the most dangerous of viruses. Under the questioning gaze of the contemporary artist, however, the ‘paused’ reality is transformed into a productive realm from which they filter that, which is emblematic, strange, meaningful, unexpectedly dangerous or beautiful.
During the early months of Covid–19 onslaught, painter Davit Kochunts used the seemingly interminably suspended time as an opportunity to forensically investigate his environment. The home, the street, the bed, the TV screen, classical art and traditional culture become symptoms of a dying and metamorphosing actuality, which are resurrected in the artist’s perception as newly reimagined image-artefacts.
The Date Unknown series began from sketches penned in school notebooks and was finished after the artist returned from the 2020 war in Artsakh. In these works, Kochunts appears to ‘relearn’ how to structure the nodes of normality and the everyday, following a great calamity. Forming the basis of all his canvases, the exposed white background and the grid – two of the key tools of modernist and conceptual art – are employed by Kochunts as a mechanism for deconstruction and reconstruction. The banal and the ordinary transmute into forms with peculiar power, since the artist imbues them with confounding sensual qualities. This is a vision of a world in flux, mired in confusion and apathetic spectacle. But underneath all the frightening metaphors that these paintings evoke is a more heartening core – the politics of sincerity and lack of heroic posturing. Kochunts’ approachable, Pop-art style and witty humor encourages the viewer to get into a dialogue about shared anxieties, and be frank about our own fragility and hidden impulses.
In the amorphous flow of post-war dejection, where everything stands to lose meaning, art comes not so much as a device for representation or reflection, but as a rescue ring, which collates the fragments of reality into a new intellectual and, especially, communicational system. Thus, with his inaugural solo exhibition, Kochunts imaginatively reinstates painting as a force that can resist the whirlpool of history, and help us crystalize and mend the aftermath of the chaos.
