VARUJAN BOGHOSIAN—A SURVEY:

Collage, Watercolors, & Sculpture

Is this stage all we have? ask the works of Varujan Boghosian—the tarot’s Fool answers with a shrug and a wink. Since the first vaguely expressed symmetry of their calligraphy emerged, artists have reiterated authenticity by outstripping the originals.

Boghosian’s mastery of ‘the line in its time’ and its particular and universal projections—both those on paper and as seen in the relic object which, in new community, transcends its history to become symbol—seems to alchemically precipitate his unique cornucopia of remembrance in exact proportion to a discovered need for re-visitation, and thus, re-invention.

Here Leonardo goes native in the Age of Victoria, then explodes like a psychedelic time-bomb into the 1960’s. Poor, hopeful Orpheus is imprisoned in brick—the sensuous declinations of an architecture eternally undercut by myth and iteration. Intersecting watercolor shredding form into a blizzard of life erupts in every fissure where, if it did not, the Unchanging might show through.

These works exist where to make means to endure, where with rough hands held palms up we seek record of the loss that it is our birthright, The Fool’s wink will advise: This is the place.

VARUJAN BOGHOSIAN (b. 1926), a native of Connecticut (MFA, Yale University), was a Fulbright Scholar in 1953, and twice Sculptor in Residence at the American Academy in Rome. His work is collected in The Museum of Modern Art and The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, as well as in many other important museums around the country.

--R Skogsberg

Recent show at BigTown Gallery, Rochester, VT