Charles Garabedian at Betty Cuningham

The mythologizing paintings of Los Angeles-based artist Charles Garabedian present the mythic women of Troy and Eden, the endlessly repetitive wars of ancient and modern history, the deserts and shores of the Mediterranean. Of Armenian descent and an avowed believer in the universal and archetypal, the octogenarian artist speaks in various interviews of his immersion in the epic narrative of the Iliad, of ancient Greece and the discovery of a sense of heritage in the medieval manuscripts of Armenia.

In this exhibition he conveys his admiration for the beauty of women and the carrying power of landscape. The works are all on paper, push-pinned to the gallery walls and related by iconography and formal concerns. At 60 by 78 inches, his acrylic on paper Mythological Figure (2005), spliced at the center, shows a naiad (a nymph of brook and stream) sprawled angularly in a blue rivulet that flows between sandy banks under no horizon at all. Patches of vibrant green grasses and pale-blue-to-white strokes suggest the rippling of water over rocks. The woman swimming in the right third of Garabedian's 48-by-121-inch Channel Swimmer (2006) has much the same posture, nearly a swastika, arms and legs bent to a crawl. To the left is the hull of a striped boat, which suggests the presence of a support crew.

Two other figures are devoid of arms, as though such extremities were extraneous to the depiction of the body. In a 24-by-126-inch watercolor, Ophelia (2005) glides through the paper panels of a flowered stream. Her eyes are wide, a green star on her cheek, another at a shoulder where an arm might be. Of acrylic on paper, the even larger expanse of Africa (2006) consists of a rocky landscape, green hills to the left, water in the distance. A dark, elongated, supine figure--like the rolling earth of Mother Africa--is vast in comparison with two upright women at the ends of the expanse, one a pink-skinned blonde, the other entirely blue. In the middle distance Garabedian has placed a Hellenic temple and, nearby, small in proportion, the tented outline of a desert encampment.

At 48 by 270 inches the scroll-like acrylic-on-paper Air Raid (2006) portrays a parched, war-torn landscape, the sea to the right and, close at hand, a blue warship at harbor with a capstan at its bow. Swarms of threatening airplanes dart wildly across the painting's considerable length, and at dead center a plane seems to plummet from the sky. There are empty coffins and vacant buildings, a truncated temple, more trucks, a tree cut from its base. In all this chaos, Garabedian offers the painter as witness for the dead in time of war.

COPYRIGHT 2007 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning