“Even Aram’s most pared-down and bluntly assertive works elude the construction of narratives in the same way that dreams, according to many studies, are not narrative at all but scattered mental pictures the dreamer fashions into a story upon waking to make sense of raw material in the unconscious. Aram’s visions capture tumult and turmoil, and in the work overall, a certain lividness troubles the exuberant depiction of, for lack of a better phrase, the enthusiastic sense of life—the fireworks, the extravagance of mystical illumination, the glory of battle, the spectacle of religious and national triumphalism. “
Gary Indiana – Uneasy Delights, 23rd February 2009, Art in America.
This work is part of the Of Flames and Splendour series. In this body of work, Kamrooz Aram engages with an imaginary, surreal visual language referring to the universal abstract iconography inherent to human’s existential symbolism and ideologies. His compositions are evocative of parallel universes built on potent signifiers, often reminiscent of the afterlife. Aram endows his paintings with a sense of speed and visual amplitude, as if one was subject to a sudden hallucination. Here, an eagle is triumphally perched atop a pile of corpse-like features, gazing over an ectoplasmic vortex of green and yellow lights in what seems to reflect a state of spiritual elevation.