The closer the star, 2024

Ara Deinde  

With oil, acrylic, oil pastel and wood dust as his basic tools, Ara Deinde paints about his journey on canvas and paper, turning himself and other subjects he's familiar with into reflective portraits set in dreamscapes brewing with metaphors, each form striking and compelling us to listen. The kind of listening his works command isn't the boring, aimless self-indulging type. Instead, this listening transports us through our own respective journeys, allowing us observe our time on this planet and how we've evolved. Each piece by Ara is loud in its depiction of the elusive beauty of solitude and the ordinariness that permeates human life. This 'ordinariness', his works assert, contributes to our evolution in seemingly inconsequential ways. As we experience his works in overview, we experience a time capsule of sorts. Each work plunges viewers into dream states riddled with disturbingly pleasant abstractions, geometric cunning and a commentary on the deep and fantastical recesses of thought. Ara performs the triad role of artist, historian and futurist. As artist he compels us to appreciate the fleeting beauty of the ordinary. As historian and futurist, he introduces us to the shared responsibility of self-examination, a practice vital not just for our own self awareness but also for positioning ourselves for things to come. Ara charms us by his wit, aesthetic brilliance and the frightening understanding of the human condition, all of which are welded painfully and clearly on his canvases teeming with elements of a grand time capsule.