Multi Perspective Dimensions: The Alchemical Art of Aazam Irilian
by: Shana Nys Dambrot, art critic, curator and author
Los Angeles 2024
Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less. —Marie Curie
In the beginning, it was just about experimentation. Aazam Irilian was in her painting studio, chasing a sense of mystery. From the particulate, atomic “Flow” and evolving into the molten, prismatic “New World” series, she practiced her penchant for fluid, multi-perspectival dimensions, deepening colors, and aspects of simultaneous perspectives. To further energize each canvas—to honor a spark in her work that was already reaching toward something beyond itself—she turned to alchemy.
Salt is life itself, but it is not alive. Its crystals are hard and delicate and ever-changing. It's a humble material with Biblical echoes, and it has a role in the present ecological discourse. “I loved the texture that I was getting from the salt and the way it was affecting the movements of the paint,” she says. “I'm inspired to bridge the gap between art and science. But lately I'm moving away from using salt on canvas, because I want to make sure that when a piece leaves the studio, I don't have to worry about it continuing to…evolve on its own.”
Instead, she manifested a different kind of evolution—one that was less focused on the nature of the medium and more engaged with the medium’s power to open portals to other, higher light-filled dimensions. From a rich palette of hot seasons and gemstone flames, during the tumultuous, interior times of 2020, she turned to the resonant refuge of blue.
“Indigo Dreaming” is a painting series full of stories—about herself, her life, her loved ones, the world in its chaos. Her paintings from this time have multiple layers like Aboriginal art whose meanings reveal themselves with time and age. At first glance abstract, infused in its flowing choreography of color and physics are Aazam’s responses to the fear, othering, and violence in the world—communicating in their harmony of swirls the essential oneness of humanity across its differences.
“The idea was to begin with the indigo and its variations, then to introduce one additional color and to allow and observe how they flow into each other in a way that creates new patterns, new colors. I see this as a metaphor for the free interaction of people,” she says. “My vision with this series was—and remains—that we will be able to see, love, and protect this beautiful human community.”
As much as her previous work was about embracing the world, in Aazam’s newer pieces, from the ongoing “Beyond the Veil'' series, she takes on the idea of the multiverse—the increasingly popular and proven idea that there are worlds that are not visible to our eyes, and yet exist. “I've always been interested in the world beyond,” Aazam says, and in her imagining of it, the other realm is overflowing with light. “You can call it divine light. You can call it spirit, whatever. But there's a whole universe of pure light that we can experience if we open ourselves.” In that context, she sees these paintings as rifts in the fabric of time and space, mysterious places where the light can come through.
It’s so appealing, even satisfying, to stray into a conversation about the web of optics, transference, quantum physics, observational effects, Doctor Who, Ursula K. LeGuin, and even the recent artist-built Marvel multiverses. An unexpected vector, in some ways, in the context of a conversation about Abstract Expressionism, but the one to follow is the question about how a painter makes that fine art idiom into something personal, multidimensional, spiritual, and modern.
And Aazam makes digital work, as well; perhaps counterintuitively, it’s initially based on the salt crystals. She grows them in her laboratory—er, her studio—introducing organic materials and found objects for the salt to grow on. She photographs the results and layers them to create digital assemblages—new hybrids of the organic and technological, metaphors and metonymies that contain their own opposites at the same time, hinting at something that could go on forever.
Aazam has ancestors in art history—painters like Helen Frankenthaler who investigated flow, flatness, and saturation as an extension of both her body and her consciousness; or Anselm Kiefer and how he likes to bury his canvases in the earth to see what nature has to contribute. Petra Cortright, who uses digital interventions into conventional painting to expose the true mechanics of invention. Visionary artists, especially pioneers like Agnes Pelton and Emil Bisttram who sought to give fixed form to invisible forces and create prompts for interior questing. Georgia O’Keeffe, with her love of the fractal matrix behind all the world, and her feminized ideation of that energy…
To these conversations, Aazam Irilian brings her own perspective, sense of materials, unbounded curiosity, and a desire for transcendence—creating and solving life’s small mysteries one canvas at a time.
Painting the Flow: The Glorious Art of Aazam Irilian
by Betty Ann Brown, Art Historian, Critic & Curator l July 2021
If you are quiet enough, you will hear the flow of the universe. You will feel its rhythm. Go with this flow. Happiness lies ahead. ~The Buddha
Aazam Irilian allows paint to flow across her canvases in elegant chromatic fields that suggest water, waves, and cosmic nebula. Her paintings are abstract, but they inspire viewers to engage in Pareidolia, the psychological tendency to see meaningful shapes in ambiguous visual patterns. (Do you see the horse in that cloud? Doesn’t that coastline remind you of an old man’s profile?)
The paintings bear witness to the artist’s process: her immersion in what Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the flow. Fascinated by people–especially artists–who became so involved in an activity that nothing else seemed to matter, Csikszentmihalyi analyzed the flow experience as an altered state based on total collaboration with what shows up. For Irilian, “what shows up” is the nature of paint, its viscosity, texture, and malleability. She pours watery pigment over the canvas, allowing it to flow into pictorial existence. Then she layers the paint with salt and other minerals dissolved in liquid and allowed to dry in lacey chemical patterns. Both of her materials–the paint and the salts–flow spatially. And Irilian’s mindful concentration on her process evokes the flow experience.
Irilian’s Indigo Dreaming series presents a group of canvases crossed by an astonishing range of blues: azure, cobalt, sapphire, and ultramarine. Blue has a long historical significance: the Ancient Sumerians and their Egyptian contemporaries used lapis lazuli imported from far-off Afghanistan to symbolize birth, rebirth, water and the heavens. All of these references are poetically evoked by Irilian’s elegant canvases.
Cenote Medicine has a darker palette, with blue framed by mossy green and splashes of blood red. Inspired by her experience of the sacred cenote in the Ancient Maya site of Chichen Itza (in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula), the artist allowed her flowing paint to build geological references. Hills, caves, and sparkling rivers of gold swirl across the compositions, encrusted by foaming splashes of white mineral salts.
Irilian’s most recent series is entitled Beyond the Veil. The sharp, angular lines contrast markedly with her earlier curvilinear preferences. Some are blackened, like burnt tree limbs. Others are amber or coral, introducing new tones to the oeuvre. The artist has written about the experience of creating these works:
Veils of color,
Appear in layers of shimmering lights,
Flashes with reflective edges.
Stepping beyond the veils,
I find myself,
In worlds, intriguing and vast,
Each more astonishing than the next…
This quest for “intriguing and vast” worlds, “each more astonishing than the next” could be used to characterize Irilian’s flow process in all of her painting series. And we as viewers are invited to enjoy the aesthetic pleasures of exploring such astonishing worlds with the art.
Aazam Irilian’s Stories of Dementia
By: Dr. Betty Ann Brown, art historian, critic and curator
I tell a story, and therefore I exist. Shekhar Kapur
California artist Aazam Irilian has always dealt with time and memory in her artworks. Over the last several years, she cared for her beloved husband as he suffered from dementia. When he went into board and care, she transitioned from lyrical abstract paintings to installation work honoring people devastated by dementia. Her “Preserved Memories” is composed of three series of artworks. One group is elegant drawings of cells and neurons on lightweight Pellon fabric. These banner-like images serve as “interior portraits” of dementia patients. The second component is comprised of photographs printed on Duralar. The images at the top are clear, but as they are reprinted down the banner, they gradually fade–much like ageing memories. The two kinds of banners hang near assemblage sculptures of memory-laden objects that refer to the stories with which people identified themselves. The mnemonic objects are selected and arranged on plexiglass pedestals, then adorned with splashes of salt crystals representing the waves of memory, identity, and loss. (The artist has used salt crystals to great effect on the surfaces of some of her abstract paintings.) Irilian’s compilation of memorabilia recalls the religious tradition of reliquaries, precious containers that held sacred relics and were intended to sustain the memory of past people and events. (Christian relics, for example, included the physical remains of saints, including bones, as well as pieces of clothing and other objects associated with the religious figures. Relics–especially those associated with the prophet Muhammad–were venerated in Islam as well.)
In “Preserved Memories,” Irilian’s husband, who loved soccer, is portrayed by a referee’s shirt and a cluster of team badges. An elderly woman, who loved antique shopping with her daughter, is recalled by a vintage cup and saucer, carefully positioned atop a crocheted doily. Another woman is portrayed by a white lace wedding veil: obviously, her marriage was a cherished remembrance. And one man is represented by thick-rimmed glasses, green amber prayer beads, and a ring of brown amber set in silver: a Muslim, he spent many hours prayerfully reading the Koran.
The third component of the “Preserved Memories” installation is a series of recordings about people with dementia. Irilian taped her friends, family, and other acquaintances as they spoke about their experiences with loved ones who had dementia. Their words form an auditory counterpoint to the visual artworks. As we gaze at one pedestal of memorabilia or one banner of cellular traces, the spoken stories add a further dimension to the aesthetic environment.
Memory loss is a disturbing part of the ageing process. One out of nine Americans over the age of 70 has dementia or Alzheimers, but the general public has very little awareness of these pervasive conditions. People with dementia gradually lose memories…which means they lose the stories they have always told themselves about who they are. But as actress Carey Mulligan reminds us, “Those with dementia are still people and they still have stories and they still have character and they are all individuals and they are all unique. And they just need to be interacted with on a human level.” Aazam Irilian’s “Preserved Memories” installation presents the stories of individuals with dementia, giving them voices through the presentation of the objects and images that meant so much to them.