CONDO 2024: Hosting Marfa' Projects, Beirut

About

Marfa’ Projects works with local and regional artists to produce and present a programme that engages with Beirut’s diverse contemporary art scene.

Primarily a painter, Talar Aghbashian's approach comes from a place of discovery, exploring the human relationship to the landscape. Aghbashian’s paintings are atemporal. Their representations of loss and ruin are not fixed by time, but are timeless because of their allegorical quality.

In Solace of the Afterimage, landscapes slowly transition on the canvas surface, with the starting point as a structure, a shape that can stand or be. What slowly emerges from the composition forms as though a creature or monster, a transient vampire on which bits of landscape get stuck. In some cases the landscape takes over these character- structures foregrounding itself as the protagonist of the image, being as much a living breathing thingas its figure counterparts.So far removed are we from the living- landscape that we would otherwise miss it. The painting looks at you and you want to peer back.

Talar Aghbashian (b. 1981, Beirut, Lebanon) lives and works in London