Armando Alemdar Ara | Synergy | 2020
“…In his distinct abstract style imbued with a clear sense of movement we can witness the purity of Platonic ideas that has influenced him for most of his career. There is a swiftness, potency in his flowing abstracted forms and yet, he uses a traditional colour palette and painted method.
In the current body of work Armando has immersed himself into a more figurative style. However, Synergy remains the natural outcome of Armando’s work at this stage of his oeuvre, where the interaction of representational and abstract elements are combined to produce a total effect that is greater than the sum of the individual elements. Synergy also symbolises Love, where two beings join energies and become something higher, something holy.
At times we can notice that some parts of the forms are repeated, creating an effect of redoubling of energy and more intricate rhythms and intervals. These duplications reflect Armando’s avowed interest in expressing a succession of moments; for the repetition of identical or similar forms may suggest – as the carvers of the Parthenon Frieze must have known – uninterrupted duration, or a single form evolving in time. Elsewhere, the repeats hint at subtler mystification; the forms forever caught in marvelling reciprocal self-contemplation. These forms, which can be read either as one figure proliferated in two or three bodies or as one body in several states of mind or places at once, compel an instinctive reconsideration of what is actually represented.
Perhaps the biggest achievement in Armando’s art is that the breakdown of the recognisable human figure is not only achieved by simplification of form, but by visual enrichment and amplification of form and colour which somehow act as guardians against the depletion of content. His style is Modern because the forms are vital, open processes in space.
Armando is essentially a humanist, because the human figure is his lasting subject. The rich, magical colours act as a bridge to another dimension with forms that contain silent eloquence unburdened by tradition.”
– Synergy, Zari Gallery, 2020