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Yerevan’s Cafesjian Center for the Arts announces the opening of a unique exhibition titled ‘Mika Vatinyan: Secret Equations’ on 1 December 2018.

The eleven paintings that make up Mika Vatinyan’s Secret Equations series (2017-18), hang side by side in the Interactive Study Center of the Cafesjian Center. They all measure 200x145cm and mostly consist of monochrome blots and scratches that have either hidden or erased SOMETHING out, the arts center said on Facebook.

Arranged in loose grids and interspaced with mathematical symbols, what seems veiled from our view are numbers. The paintings appear like a puzzle and there are various ‘clues’ – the repeated mathematical formulas, the multiplied photographs of the artist pasted on one of the works and so on – which point to a meaning to be unlocked.

And yet, looking closer and longer at these stains and marks only makes it less clear what the paintings exactly mean. The series begins to appear as a satire of everything in between suprematism and conceptual art, presented like an absurdist echo of iconostases. Is this then a melancholic realization of the impossibility of finding insight and truth – a kind of mourning for art’s own ‘end’?

Vatinyan (b. 1972, Yerevan) has touched upon this question throughout his career. Having graduated from Yerevan State Institute of Theatre and Cinematography in 1994, he is known as one half of the pop-duo ‘The Deenjes’, an actor and director who has also been making considerable strides in contemporary art. Secret Equations, just like Vatinyan’s films and photographic works, acknowledges the state of uncertainty surrounding artistic practice today by asking: what is the promise of art which lures with so much expectation only to leave us puzzled and mystified after the encounter?

Art, Vatinyan seems to say, is not a history lesson or an ‘update’ on current affairs. Like pages from a school work book, his paintings repeat and redo the same exercise by erasing, rethinking and failing. As a result, art becomes something that ‘takes place’ not so much through creation but deconstruction, ruination and constant intellectual modifications. Despite this, traces of older models and ideas are kept and reconsidered. This process does not promise a presupposed catharsis, but offers us the prospect of new aesthetic and philosophical conditions outside of abortive formulas.

The project coordinator is Vigen Galstyan. The exhibition has been organized with the support of the Cafesjian Center for the Arts and realized under the Financial Support for Art Project program of Armenia Art Foundation.

The exhibition runs through 24 February 2019. Admission is free.