A Dragon 2007

Vigen Vartanov built this piece, A Dragon, out of mixed media, and it looks like it was put together over time. You can see how his process becomes a narrative. The work is wonderfully gritty, with aged timber acting as a frame for an oriental scene, overlaid with rusty metalwork and odd sculptural elements. There's something brutal in the contrast between the notional serenity of the landscape painting and the rusted and bolted objects in the foreground. The dragon itself is rendered as a kind of spiky ball, impaled by what looks like an old cake fork. That fork makes me think of Kurt Schwitters, and his approach to using found materials as a way of making art that exists somewhere between painting and sculpture. Vartanov's work has a similar kind of open-ended feeling, one that recognizes that art is a conversation, a series of possibilities rather than something fixed and certain.